Silver Ball is a work commissioned by the Centre national des arts plastiques (Cnap) as a temporary, reactivatable work for public spaces.
The photos below show the first activation of Silver Ball at La Bernerie-en-Retz (Loire-Atlantique) in 2022-23. Many thanks to Barbara Dieuzayde, in charge of this program at CNAP, for her demanding and patient support throughout the year.
Silver Ball is an evolving dance sculpture, first materialized by a lino floor mat, then by a stage-podium destined to take its place in the public space. Colored dance motifs are drawn on both the floor mat and the stage. The dancers’ bodies become a tool for vertical interpretation of these graphic elements. What appears to be a drawing on the floor turns out to be sculpture, scenography and performance. The shapes and colors of the motifs come to life like shadows of presences. Silver Ball is a machine for bringing together people from different horizons, a kind of modern carnival that questions representations and bodily experience as a common language, where space and time become the condition of the work. Silver Ball produces unexpected flows and encounters. It’s a performative device for creating energy and collective joy, in the stretched time of a collaboration between a group of children and elderly people. Silver Ball opens itself up to the world in order to thwart certainties, redefine and reverse the roles and places we occupy in society.
Silver Ball is an intergenerational participative work that asserts the right to be different and to share In our current environment - the Covid crisis, the exclusion and fragility of the elderly, the malaise of children and teenagers, individualism, the fragmentation of beings, the fragmentation of the city and its urban spaces - it is necessary to rethink social links and the values to be shared. The aging body is above all marked by Western aesthetic standards. The "old", like a perishable accident, is reduced to its membership of an age group, that of degeneration and the end. Old age, on the other hand, should be seen as a journey, not an immobilization. At home or at school, children do not always find the freedom to develop an emancipatory body language. The spirit of Silver Ball, with its desire to intensify time and existence, is not to be reduced to one's age, but to become, to vary, to embrace the movement of life. "Let's dance, otherwise we're lost", said Pina Bausch.
Silver Ball reinvents voguing in favor of a new community Voguing is a dance parade born in the 70's, in New Jersey, on the initiative of black and Latino transgender homosexual minorities who invented in ballrooms a sensual choreographic language where intimacies are exposed, asserted and rubbed up against each other in the liberated joys of cross-dressing and dance. Silver Ball is this new home, a house open to the mature beauties of Silver Age (silver hair) and children - two communities on the margins - and to the specific bodily issues that benefit from meeting on the terrain of dance and play.