Anne Creissels / Qingmei Yao
For the fourth season running, the performance seminar Partitions (Performances) focuses its interest in hybrid forms of research at the crossroads and art and lectures. How is a myth constructed? Through what process is it transformed? How does it shed light for us on the present-day world?
The brief of this first session is to broach the importance of myth in social and political history, and its permanence in art history. In the form of “theoretical performance”, Anne Creissels analyzes the recurrence of the association between woman and bird, as illustrated in particular by the myth of Leda and the Swan.
In San Zu Ding et son motif, Qingmei Yao is interested in the possible roots of communism through the hypothesis of a pre-existence in the archaic Chinese language of the combined signs of the hammer and the sickle.
► Listen to the performances here.
Anne Creissels / la découpe des culottes (une performance théorique) / cutting up pants (a theoretical performance)
Anne Creissels, who is an art researcher and artist, proposes theoretical lectures in performative forms, in which her research is presented around the representation of myths in art and, more particularly, those myths which deal with the feminine. Especially through the analysis of the different occurrences of the combination of woman and bird in the great ground-breaking myths of western cultural history, much of it bequeathed by the Greeks, Anne Creissels strives to shed light on how myth “works” in art and in our collective unconscious, by appraising its subversive potential.
A teacher of visual arts and doctor in the History and Theory of the Arts at the EHESS, Anne Creissels lectures in visual arts at the Université de Lille-3. Her research, which is at once theoretical and artistic, focuses especially on the survival of myths in contemporary art. Within her company “a + b objet danse”, she is developing a production of stage and performance forms, presented in particular at the Studio Micadanse and at the Ménagerie de Verre in Paris, and at the Le Phénix theatre in Valenciennes. She has published an essay, Prêter son corps au mythe: le féminin et l’art contemporain (Le Félin, 2009) and contributed articles to various magazine,s including Les Cahiers de MNAM.
This performance has enjoyed the support of the Ménagerie de Verre, as part of the Studiolabs programme.
Qingmei Yao / San Zu Ding and its motif
From the discovery of an inscription on a ritual pot from the Neolithic age to the symbols of communist China, Qingmei Yao uses an analysis of Chinese ideograms to retrace the many different variations of the combined signs of the hammer and the sickle, and the development of their meanings down the ages. Combining the rigour of scientific research with an erudite art of drift (dérive), she works out a set of hypotheses borrowing her references as much from archaeological analyses as from theoretical, psychoanalytical, semantic and linguistic interpretations, demonstrating a possible Chinese tendency towards communism, in existence since proto-historical China, and in particular in shamanic ritual practices.
Born in China, she lives and works in Paris. Her performances shift forms and gestures inherited from Chinese history and ideology. A graduate of the Villa Arson in 2013, after studying marketing in China, she won the 2013 special jury prize at the Salon de Montrouge. In 2015 she will exhibit at Paradise in Nantes and at the Palais de Tokyo.
