À l'Ouest

First showing 16, 17 & 18 May 2018

le lieu unique, Centre for contemporary culture in Nantes

This piece is dedicated to Marguerite Wylde (1950-2017)

"To strike the ground with our feet, pound the sacred earth, to communicate with the spirits, to make the body and the earth resonate with the proclamation of our existence in the world, our resistance, our rebellion, stomping to wake the dead, tapping like the deaf, hoping for ghosts, to vibrate, to shake our living matter, to stand as a shield against hidden death, to chant our tiny lives."

The background to this project: a foreign perspective, a journey of discovery in the footsteps of the composer Moondog, to the heart of the Aboriginal reserves of Canada and North America. A pretext to discover Native American culture, a childhood fantasy that has endured into adulthood, a story that is both fascinating and shameful. Ultimately, it's a story at the heart of today’s appalling reality.

Aim: to share the experience of this seminal pulse and what it continues to represent for these communities: the affirmation of a culture that is still alive despite the genocide, a revolutionary and spiritual heart that continues to beat against the tide of the West.

Beyond this encounter, there is the question of displacement, geographical, cultural, artistic and personal, to perhaps also question our own foundations, boundaries and avant-gardes. This question is articulated around a recurring motif: the pulse and its repetition.

An endeavour to reveal how this beating of the heart, of bodies, and of the world is also our own.

And then there's a people who never took more from nature than it could provide and who continue to defend these values today in Trump's America, a people who one day imagined defeating entire cavalries of heavily-armed soldiers by dancing day and night - that speaks to me and it should speak to us all.

Who are the new Indians?

Olivia Grandville