This publication presents research conducted by visual artist and choreographer Clarissa Bauman over two years, in the frame of the exerce MA in choreography and performance (National Choreographic Center of Montpellier / Occitanie). Here, writing becomes movement, a weaving of words, gestures, images, and drawings that rub against each other in a dialogue articulated from page to page.
"The choreography of small, overlooked gestures from moments of boredom, letting loose, detours. The finger sliding along the table, the arm coinciding with the back of this wooden chair. The coincidence of a gesture with an image, and the instantaneous disparition of this image in the body, as it transforms into the sketch of another movement. Contours, strokes, perspective lines, everything sinuous, asking at what moment does the image appear, emerge, and then become undone? The impossibility, within the body, of an image being fixed, still, one. (…)
At this point in the writing, I perceive text less as a desire to organise, sediment, or give form to something, whatever it might be, but rather as a desire to find the outlines of connections between materials left hanging in the room I share with them, the tight space around the table, the images pinned to the walls in front of and behind me, the markings layered, scratched, or sketched in notebooks, the pages from books insistently revisited these last months, the memories that wane, escape, or insinuate themselves between these spaces. Developing a strategy for distracted observation."
"Exerce, écrits chorégraphiques" is a series that offers a chance to read, see and practice a key stage in the work of students/artists/researchers as part of the "Exerce" training program, initiated in 2011 by the National Choreographic Center of Montpellier / Occitanie, directed by Christian Rizzo, and the Paul Valéry Montpellier 3 University.
Each edition presents the writings of former Exerce students at the time of their thesis defense at the end of the Master's program. The publication is neither reprinted nor reworked. It is restored in one color to its original format. At the end of the book, each artist is given carte blanche to contextualize and extend this research in the form of texts, images and documents.
Like her work in its many forms—books, installations, performances and videos—the practice of Clarissa Clarissa Baumann (born 1988 in Rio de Janeiro, Brasil, lives in Montpellier, France) resists generic assignments. Initially trained at the School of Industrial Design in Rio de Janeiro and at the Beaux-Arts in Paris, she worked with dance and circus before joining the master's program in Montpellier. On the lookout for the imperceptible gestures of everyday life, she instructs an intimate dialogue between architecture, body and memory.
Personal and affective references are intertwined with the facts of history, spaces meet, a cartography is invented.
