Project Description

This Dancerie: The Paris Project
A collaboration project by Tony Whitfield, Sebastiano d'Ayala Valva, Klaus Fruchtnis, Thierry Micouin, Nils Nusens, Patricio Sarmiento and Andrew Alden


This Dancerie is a multi-event, multi-site, multi-media work that explores the ways in which gay men have created public expressions of desire despite mainstream prohibitions of manifestations of those aspects of their lives in the context of Paris as a complex historical cultural arena for this exploration.

The pretext of This Dancerie is urbanization as a prerequisite for homosexual subculture and the understanding that despite the absence of “gay ghettos, ” gay men developed and carried on forbidden lives in public it cities around the world. This Dancerie focuses on Paris as a cross-road of queer life in which, although, technically, homosexuality was legal since 1791, decency was legislated and under surveillance.

This Dancerie will create a series of foci on Paris as a site of refuge for queer men and the environments they historically frequented. Particular attention will be placed on developing narratives that include a range of differing intersections of class, race, creeds, ethnicities and gender the collaborators will develop a movement based-work for male groupings drawing upon culturally specific traditions. The role immigration plays in these narratives will also be underscored.

This Dancerie is a multi-event, multimedia collaborative work under the artistic direction of Tony Whitfield. This project will be a collaboration between Whitfield, as Executive Producer and Artistic Director, Thierry Micouin as Director of Choreography, media artist Klaus Fruchtnis as Technical Director, fashion designer Patricio Sarmiento, filmmaker Sebastiano d’Ayala Valva and composer/musician Nils Nussen, all from France and composer/ musician Andrew Alden, and filmmakers Joe Lumbroso and Dyana Winkler, from the United States. Eight to ten sites across the City where same sex desire has created a shifting landscape of criminalized activity, class-complicated entanglements, immigrant freedom, forbidden commerce, transgressive beauty and encoded seduction will be the context for short filmed dance/movement based narratives since 1870. Each three to five minute films will begin with a cruising ritual and be filmed in those spaces. For several evenings the films will be presented in situ as projected images activated by passersby movement. Ideally these installations would be debuted as part of Paris’ La Nuit Blanche in 2017.

These films would then be brought together into a single space to produce an additional evening long performance or “dance party” that would be digitally randomized and improvisationally scored for classical ensemble and world pop musicians. Ideally the space would be situated in a cultural center and include a live performance component that involved local gay residents. Various forms of social media will be employed to augment and reveal aspects of the project's narrative content during the culminating dance party and its scatter site installations.

Several aspects of this project should move it beyond the context of performance based works that explore cultural identity and history. They include: the site specific nature of the public installation that will seek to revive unknown queer histories in ways that immerse the audience in the projected work; the creation of apps that will allow the participant to access deeper know of the history behind the narrative they have stumbled into as well as information about the artwork itself and other components of the work at other sites across Paris as well as multifaceted entries into the "dance party."

It is anticipated that audiences for This Dancerie will include: post modern dance, experimental music, expanded cinema, public art and contemporary performing arts audiences. In addition general public members who are attending events associated with Paris' La Nuit Blanche 2017 and local commmunities adjacent to the various sites in which This Danceries' short constituent works will be situated.This project will seek to engage LGBTQI populations including scholars, artists, performers and youth. Social media, print and electronic media associated with La Nuit Blanche and the venue that will host the culminating event will be drawn upon in addition to apps established specifically for This Dancerie.

The primary goal is to reveal the queer past and present of Paris as an urban geography that has been multifaceted, ethnically, economically, and culturally diverse while also revealing those aspects of queer life that defy normalization, concealment behind closed doors challenge notions of "decency" are tied to desire and find expression despite histories of policing and surveillance. In addition this work will seek to engage collaborative, improvisational and interactive structures and technologies to create social points of entry and discussion among various queer communities across Paris and beyond as a means of expanding current discussions about same sex desire.


Thursday, March 26, 2015

Food For Thought: Paris and James Baldwin

Homosexuality in the Time of James Baldwin

Posted on November 28, 2010 by 
by Evan Williams
Every country in Europe that participated in War World II found its male to female ratio out of proportion.  Hysteria ripped through the population as news of the drop in the population of men spread.  The idea of homosexuality filled newspapers and magazines, as observers feared an increase in lesbian activity due to the decrease in the number of men and an increase in gay activity, which Dagmar Herzog attributed to the “lack of a heterosexual outlet during the war” (164).  Europe was also facing a high divorce rate due to the pool of newly single women looking for companions and the economic and emotional difficulties many people were pitted against after the war.  These lifestyle changes, coupled with the Nazi’s conservative view on homosexuality, created a division of thought about what was appropriate or not for members of society. Herzog called this time a “sexually conservative era” and France and the recently arrived James Baldwin would have felt the confusion surrounding it (165).
The Nazis condemned homosexuality politically, using tactics such as castration, torture, and murder to scare its citizens into being heterosexual (Herzog 168).  The homophobia that arose from such condemnation caused many citizens in occupied territories, such as France, to shy away from accepting homosexuality and some even came to resent homosexuals.  The Nazis themselves were publicly sexually conservative, but as it was later avowed, were not shy about sexual fulfillment.  Highly ranked officials in the Nazi regime admitted to holding sexual pleasure in high regard after the war.  The conservative messages that were sent during wartime and the truth that came out after the war were extremely different, and this confused many citizens as to what the right path of acceptance was.  The natural response to this confusion socially was carefulness and conservativeness.
In comparison to Europe, the America that James Baldwin left had sodomy laws that existed in all 50 states until the early part of the 1960s.  The number of arrests related to sodomy (consensual or not) rose sharply in the 1950s (Eskridge 77).  Sodomy laws were not declared unconstitutional in the United States until 2003, and there are still citizens incarcerated for sodomy across the country.  The laws in America were more stringent than those in Europe, but the entire Western world felt the effects of the laws in action, and France was no different.
In Paris, homosexuality was openly discussed and openly written about, but people were still being condemned to prison for acts related to homosexuality.  As Florence Temagne points out, a law in 1960 called homosexuality “a social plague” (263-264).  In French society homosexuality was rebounding after its repression, but its presence was still struggling for acceptance from some heterosexuals.  Therefore, it is possible that manycitizens of France accepted James Baldwin during his time there, but it is clear that he must have proceeded with caution because there was still much reservation about homosexuality.
Works Cited
Eskridge, William N. Dishonorable Passions: Sodomy Laws in America, 1861-2003. New York: Viking, 2008. Print.
Herzog, Dagmar. “Desperately Seeking Normality: Sex and Marriage in the Wake of the War.” Life after Death: Approaches to a Cultural and Social History during the 1940s and 1950s. Ed. Richard Bessel and Dirk Schumann. Washington, D.C.: German Historical Institute, 2003. NetLibrary. Web. 8 Nov. 2010.
Tamagne, Florence. A History of Homosexuality in Europe: Berlin, London, Paris, 1919-1939, Volume I & II. New York, NY: Algora, 2006. NetLibrary. Web. 8 Nov. 2010.
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