by Latifa Laâbissi

In a white field, an (over) exposed body. Naked, unmissable, implacably there. A landscape of tense, sexual flesh, an image which is slowly covered up by other images, a symbolic dressing of sorts. The movement of this figure, overlaid with points of tension and clashing patterns, is performed by Latifa Laâbissi. A sort of crossing, weaving and melding the shadow zones of the invention of the self; laying out the connections between the ghosts of an imaginary society which is always present – and the subjective core of their development. Dancer. Woman. Arab. In France. Her body stretched out before a grimacing mirror.
Self Portrait Camouflage: the paradox of the title is a double-edged strategic verb: at once revealing and covering up, like two halves of the same movement, capturing an impossible image – which has already been caught in other histories, other speeches, other performances. How do we see the difference? And how do we expose the creative framework which brought it onstage? Using this figure, accompanied by a crowd of others, Latifa Laâbissi shows and dismantles the very fabric of politics – its social, sexual and cultural borderlines. She draws up a chart including a flag, a face, a voice – a portrait of otherness in which the camouflage is used as a kind of decoding maneuver. We see a line of symbols taken from troubled waters, passed through a filtering of perversion, subversion, laughter and grimace. There are the murmurs of voices, from a time where the humming of a song threatened. Voices of the mute, the silenced, the patronised, the pointed-at-with-fingers.
It is with these words, using this body, that we see the possibility of a reversal – from the inside – of signs overlaying each other, the droll or tragic masks covering her face. This is choreography made up of social shapes, a carnival where one is forced to examine one’s blind spot, further revealed as a construction, a palimpsest. Like the character of Marguerite Yourcenar who “saw herself seeing,” we perceive a dead zone: the bottom of the imagination from which we gaze, and the worrisome strangeness which accompanies our reflection in the mirror.

Gilles Amalvi

PERFORMERS / CREDITS
Conceived and directed by Latifa Laâbissi
Set design : Nadia Lauro
Dramaturgy : Christophe Wavelet
Sound design : Olivier Renouf
Lighting design : Yannick Fouassier
Costumes : Latifa Laâbissi and Nadia Lauro

OTHER CREDITS
Production 391
Coproduction Les Spectacles vivants – Centre Pompidou
Writing and choregraphic research residency at the Centre chorégraphique national de Montpellier Languedoc-Roussillon, and a residency under the auspices of the accueil studio programme at the Centre national de danse contemporaine in Angers.

TOURING
2010
June 10: Lille – Maison Folie Wazemmes – Festival Latitudes Contemporaines
June 5: Grenoble – MC2
March 25: Caen, Centre Chorégraphique National, in the frame of the festival Danse d’ailleurs.
March 20-21: Musée de la danse, Rennes, in the frame of the GRIMACE du REEL,+ info
February 26: Tours, Centre Chorégraphique National

2009
November 13: « Self Portrait Camouflage» (video 26 min.) projection in the frame of Videodanse 2009, Centre Pompidou, Paris.
October 14: Centre Chorégraphique National de Belfort
March 6: LiFE – Lieu International des Formes Emergentes, Saint-Nazaire
February 4-5: Side step festival, Helsinki (Finland)
January 30: Festival les Eclectiques – Halle aux Grains de Blois

2008
August 25-26: Zürich (Switzerland) – Zürcher Theaterspektakel
June 6-7: Museion, Bozen (Italy)
April 12: Saint Nazaire – le Life
April 5: Scène Nationale, Quimper
March 20: Scène Nationale, Dieppe
March 11: Scène conventionnée, Cahors
February 20-21-22: Bordeaux – TNT – Manufacture de Chaussures

2007
December 5: Caen – Centre chorégraphique national
March 1-2-3: Brest – le Quartz, festival les Antipodes
January 30-31: Wien (Austria) – Tanzquartier

2006
Creation – April 5-6-7: Paris – Centre Pompidou

IMAGES

PRESS
Political movements, article de Cathy Blisson, Télérama, février 2008
Le pays grotesque, article de Gérard Mayen, Mouvement, janvier 2007
Interview with Latifa Laâbissi, article de Laurent Goumarre, Danser

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