Showroomdummies #4

A cool, bright space. In it, twenty culturally presumed female figures, their backs towards the audience, their faces hidden, their bodies fixed in stances, each of them being like a specific word of the choreographic vocabulary of the piece. Gradually, some of these display-dummy-like beings rise from the mass. The choreography in slow motion is diffracting time and thus enabling usually unseen parts of experiences to be seen. This perceptive experience is composed in dialogue with original music by Peter Rehberg, a pioneer of electronic music in the 1990s and founder of cult music label Editions Mego. It is a choreography centered around the ideas of the animate and the inanimate, the embodied and the disembodied, presence and absence with coldness and sensuality. Every action, every encounter explores identities and power relations in their structure through choreographic thoughts as semiotics of the bodies, where the entire system of signs it deploys is a language to be read with the utmost care.

Her work on “Showroomdummies” has been running through Gisèle Vienne’s oeuvre like a common thread for more than 20 years. Together with artist, puppeteer and director Étienne Bideau-Rey, she has continued to vary and restage the performance – with each version constituting an autonomous work with a specific focus. The original version, premiered in 2001, took Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s novella “Venus in Furs” (1870) and even more Gilles Deleuze’s related analysis “Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty” (1971) as its point of departure, and its reflection on the art of suspense, suspension and subversion. Japanese horror films served as an aesthetic reference for the dolls in “Showroomdummies” for Vienne and Bideau-Rey. “Showroomdummies #4”, the latest version in the series, premiered at the ROHM Theatre Kyoto in 2020 with a cast of Japanese dancers, was presented at Centre Pompidou during the 2021 Festival d’Automne in Paris and will be shown as part of the Performing Arts Season.

Exploration of articulations and intersections between disciplines – performance, choreography, music, theatre, sculpture, installation and photography – distinguish the work of French-Austrian artist Gisèle Vienne, who studied philosophy, music, dance, visual arts and puppetry. This way of composing systems of signs considering them as languages made out of the most various forms, is at the heart of her long work on perceptive frames. It is a thinking method inspired by critical phenomenology. Her works are presented in theatres and dance houses or museums and could be described as concept or synthetic art. While lighting, sound and space serve as quasi-performers, the displayed body – be it of a human or a doll – is the basis for a subtle and profound exploration of our perception of social roles and relationships and of the concealed, naturalized and the repressed. Through the repeated questioning of the material of “Showroomdummies”, Vienne’s aesthetic investigation of body and psyche and what moves them, has undergone a significant concentration.