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: Prostitution in Paris

Foreign prostitutes flood into France

BY JOHN LICHFIELD IN PARIS
 
 
Sunday 14 July 2002
France, a country which sees itself as admirably relaxed on sexual matters, is struggling to answer the oldest question in the world. How should it deal with prostitution?
France, a country which sees itself as admirably relaxed on sexual matters, is struggling to answer the oldest question in the world. How should it deal with prostitution?
An influx of prostitutes from eastern Europe, Africa and even China, has overturned the cosy – some say hypocritical – consensus that has governed the world of vice in France for more than half a century.
The increasingly obtrusive presence of prostitutes on the streets of many French cities has launched a heated debate. Should prostitutes, and their clients, be repressed? Or should prostitution be recognised as a trade, as in Holland and Germany?
The right-wing mayor of one of the wealthiest Paris arrondissements – which has been overrun with very young prostitutes from eastern Europe – caused consternation a few days ago by calling for the re-opening of the legal brothels, or "maisons closes", which were outlawed in 1946.
The proposal by Françoise de Panafieu, the mayor of the 17th arrondissement, aroused a storm of indignation from left-wing politicians and some prostitute support groups, who accused her of wanting to "legalise slavery".
Prostitution is legal in France, but active soliciting and pimping are not. For many years street prostitution – mostly confined to the rue Saint-Denis area of central Paris or the Bois de Boulogne – was tolerated, even though soliciting and pimping were inextricable parts of the business.
The new wave of foreign prostitutes, run by violent criminal gangs, has broken down this informal arrangement. There are now thought to be 15,000 male and female prostitutes in France, with 7,000 in Paris alone. Many are illegal immigrants, from Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, francophone Africa and, more recently, China. If caught, they can be expelled, but the legal procedures take months and new girls arrive all the time.
The Interior Minister Nicola Sarkozy is drawing up a law to cut through the red tape and make it easier to expel foreign women engaged in prostitution. In the meantime, the sudden, visible presence of prostitutes in wealthy areas of Paris and other cities has brought hundreds of complaints to politicians. Some have called for prostitution to be made illegal in France for the first time.
The Paris town hall says that it will shortly call for a law which would make it illegal to buy sexual favours. Police in Bordeaux – at the request of the mayor and former prime minister Alain Juppé – are already making imaginative use of existing laws. Several men have been arrested while having sex with prostitutes in cars and accused of "sexual exhibition in a public place". Others have been formally accused of "soliciting others, with a view to sexual relations" – an accusation which is traditionally used against prostitutes, not their clients.
Nicole Ameline, the Minister for Women's Affairs in the new centre-right government of Jean-Pierre Raffarin, spoke to prostitutes on the streets of Paris last week and promised to launch an "interministerial" investigation. She dismissed the idea of re-opening the maisons closes but said that the suggestion had at least forced people to think seriously about the problem.
French prostitutes, and prostitutes' organisations, fear that the debate is already heading in the wrong direction. Any laws attacking prostitution, they say, would harm French prostitutes without curbing the influx of new girls from abroad. Claude Boucher, who runs the "Bus des femmes", a bus which tours soliciting areas to help prostitutes, complains: "Everything is getting mixed together. French prostitutes are now a minority on the streets. The foreigners are not prostitutes but slaves, victimised by criminals."
Marie, a middle-aged woman soliciting on the rue Saint-Denis, had a more direct solution. "They should just round up and throw out all these foreigners who are bringing our trade into disrepute," she said.
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