Anne Juren & Frédéric Gies – Jumelles

With the support of danceWEB / the LLB project, the former danceWEB Scholarship Programme mentor duo Anne Juren and Frédéric Gies are working on their latest production "Jumelles".

Frédéric Gies and Anne Juren share a long story of artistic collaboration and friendship. The first time they worked together was in the frame of a research lab in 2006 at Tanzquartier in Vienna. The year after, Anne invited Frédéric for another research lab in the same place. When Frédéric became head of programme of the master in choreography at DOCH in 2012, they started to invite Anne as a guest teacher. From 2014 until 2018, Anne was part of the artistic committee and of the teaching team of the master programme. In 2019, Anne danced in Frédéric’s piece Seven Extravaganzas. In 2021, they were the two mentors for DanceWEB at Impulstanz in Vienna. Over the course of the last 16 years and of these collaborations, they witnessed each other path in the dance field, accompanied each other both professionally and in their lives.

Anne and Frédéric respective choreographic works are rather different formally speaking. Yet, several connection points are obviously defining them. Both artists share a strong interest for the bodily origins of movement, which manifest in the integration of somatic practices in their work. This connects to the way they both emphasise embodiment, sensuality and the power of dance as a medium of expression. Furthermore, feminist and queer perspectives are constituent of their work.

As they were the mentors for DanceWEB last summer, they started to articulate the desire to initiate this new collaborative project, taking the shape of two solos: one solo danced by Anne and choreographed by Frédéric and a second solo danced by Frédéric and choreographed by Anne.

As they started to discuss the project, they discovered their shared love for Céline Sciamma’s movie, Portrait of a lady on fire. The movie is a romance/historical drama in which Céline Sciamma crafts an accurate, compelling tale of a female artist who falls in love with the woman she is assigned to paint. Unlike the typical romance, the film takes a more gradual approach to build a dynamic between the characters, which ultimately makes the events that follow more meaningful.

Sciamma has called “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” a “manifesto about the female gaze,” her film indeed subverts the male perspective at every turn in favour of other ways of looking. The movie playfully and beautifully explores this outside of the male gaze, opening up vast field of gazing relationships (between the model and the painter as well as between the director, the actresses and the spectators). This movie became a central element for formulating this new project.

For this two solos project, Anne and Frédéric will engage in the task of being the portraitists of one another. The process of the creation of these dancing portraits will put at its center the question of the gaze in dance. In dance, the gaze is a dynamic entity involving the dancing body of the dancer and the viewers. In a way, the gaze is not only a vision but a vaster field of corporeal experimentations in which gazing at the dance, the gaze of the dance and the gaze of a dancer are entangled and interplay constantly. The male gaze is also manifest in dance, as much as in other artistic disciplines and can be tangible in all the layers of this entanglement of gazes. It also leads to representations of bodies as passive, mute objects, eroticised or victimised. These two portraits of and by Anne and Frédéric will explore the concept of the portrait in dance, doing away with the process of objectification intrinsic to the male gaze and proposing an other economy of gazes.