Playground 2022: a playground for artists

The annual Live Arts Festival Playground, in November in Leuven, is a real playground for artists who do not want to commit to one discipline. As always, M and STUK are joining forces to do this.

More and more artists are breaking down the walls that traditionally separate the disciplines. They combine elements from installation, text, film, sculpture, architecture and choreography and often do this as part of live – performances that challenge us. They create new images that reflect on art, the world and the mediatisation of life. This autumn, at the 16th edition of Playground, you can go and see, among other things, the open-air performance 'Venus Parade' by Clédat & Petitpierre and 'Glowachrome Garden', a performance by Evelien Cammaert.

Clédat & Petitpierre

Regular Playground visitors know them from previous editions: Clédat & Petitpierre, a French artist couple combining theatre, performance and visual art in their own unique way. On 20 November, they are bringing their latest work to Leuven: 'Venus Parade', an open-air procession with references to prehistoric statues of women and Breton penitential processions: "We make art that moves through the public space."

Yvan Clédat and Coco Petitpierre are two visual artists, performers and choreographers from France. They focus on performances at the intersection of visual and performing arts.

Yvan Clédat: "During the pandemic, we were keen to create a work for the public space. We had done that before: 'The Modern Parade', a performance with walking sculptures referring to 20th-century painting. It was featured at Playground in 2013. That's how we came up with the idea for the 'Venus Parade'."

"We took inspiration from the Palaeolithic Venus figurines, small female statues from the Stone Age, tens of thousands of years ago. They have been found all over Europe, from the Pyrenees to deep into Russia. They all have remarkably large breasts and buttocks, and yet they are all different and individual. That variety appealed to us."

Coco Petitpierre: "We didn't want simply to recreate those Venus figurines but interpret them our own way. Most of the original figurines are small, people probably carried them around, and stand upright. Our statues are life-size, and they sit in a sedan chair. After twenty or thirty thousand years of standing straight, they are finally allowed to rest (laughs). We see the work as a tribute to femininity, sexuality. To our mothers too."

Yvan: "We eventually selected six Palaeolithic Venus figurines, the most famous being the Venus of Willendorf, a 25,000-year-old figurine found in a town in Austria. We first made a 3D model of each Venus. They were not exact copies, but simplified, geometric interpretations of the original. Those models were then recreated in polystyrene. We then treated them with a gloss paint that is also used in the automotive industry."

Coco: "Our Venus figurines are more or less the same shape as the original figurines but for the rest they look completely different: bright colours, smooth shapes and extremely precise workmanship. By doing so, we want to make it clear that they are autonomous works of art, not just copies. So they also stand out in an urban environment, where a lot of impressions and visual impulses fight for attention."

Penitentials in Brittany

So much for the creation process. But 'Venus Parade' is a performance: the sculptures are carried in procession through the streets.

Yvan: "Yes. Each sculpture sits on a sedan chair carried through the streets by four men or women, we deliberately made the sculptures very light. We were inspired by 'The Modern Procession' by Belgian artist Francis Alÿs. When they were doing some renovations at the MoMA in New York, some works had been temporarily moved to a depot. Once the renovations were completed, Alÿs brought reproductions of those works back to the museum in procession. Artist Kiki Smith joined in a sedan chair. A wondrous image that gave us the idea of making full-size Venus figurines. That is art that moves through the public space."

Coco: "Our parade is also a reference to the so-called pardons bretons, penitential processions from Brittany. There they carry statues of saints through Breton villages and fields. These are preceded by banners bearing the saint's name. We adopted that idea, buy our banners have the name of the sculpture, the location it was found and its age – like a giant-sized museum label."

Yvan: "Those Breton penitential processions are accompanied by music and that too was an inspiration. We had a poet write the lyrics, and a composer wrote music that matched. Those lyrics are in French, so we had them translated into Dutch especially for the performance in Leuven. But the translation has a very different rhythmic structure to the original and so we ended up having new music written for it in collaboration with the people from Playground. It will be a surprise for us too how it will sound. We don't want to compare ourselves to Merce Cunningham, the choreographer, but the approach is similar. He also never wanted to see his sets in advance."

Coco: "The 'Venus Parade' requires a lot of people: six times four porters, six banner bearers, and then around 30 singers. Together, that is about 60 people, and they are all volunteers. Playground's organisers recruit them from choirs, from music academies. It won’t be long before we are there too. We will follow the parade and give directions to the participants."

A piece of beauty

How do you expect the audience to react?

Coco: "We have only just finished the 'Venus Parade', the performance in Leuven will only be our second. But we have already played 'The Modern Parade' all over the world, and the reactions were different everywhere we went. In some countries, spectators walk along with the procession, in others they watch from the sidelines.... You never know in advance."

Yvan: "We obviously want people to come and see it and like it, but most of all we want to make an art-work that appeals to us."

"We do feel with the participants, because a parade like this is always quite tough going, in particular walking around singing all the time. When we have done 'The Modern Parade' the participants afterwards were very satisfied that they had been able to contribute to piece of beauty, that they had been able to help create something beautiful."

Playground sits at the intersection of visual and performing arts. Sounds like the ideal place for you guys.

"It is. We have been to three editions already, and we enjoy coming there just as much every time. It is an unique festival. These days, everyone talks about being interdisciplinarity but at Playground they make it happen. There is no festival like it in France. Most museums and art institutions here are stuck in their own little world. In Leuven, you have a theatre – STUK – with a heart for visual arts, as well as a museum – M – open to performing arts. We will even be able to exhibit our Venus figurines at M soon, leading up to and during the festival."

Well yes, what happens to the footage once the 'Venus Parade' is over?

"Our projects never end. We continue to perform all our shows and performances, including those from 10, 15 years ago. It is the same with the 'Venus Parade'. They are not rid of us yet (laughs)."

Evelien Cammaert

Evelien Cammaert (born 1986) combines performance, installation and photography and her work is entirely fitting for a multidisciplinary festival like Playground. She performs 'Glowachrome Garden' there which is a meditative performance you really need to take your time to take in.

"The starting point are slides that I took of places that inspired me: gardens, landscapes, houses too. For each one, I took ample time to absorb everything. I also paid attention to how everything changed: the colours, the sounds, the light, how I reacted to that myself.... I occasionally made a slide, but very sparingly. Over the course of three years, I barely used up two ﬁlm rolls. By the end, I had several dozen images, from which I made the deﬁnitive selection during slow viewing sessions in my studio."

"During the performance of 'Glowachrome Garden', those slides will be projected on screens in a darkened room. We slide the screens and there is a soundscape too. A slide is a snapshot, but through these interventions I add an element of duration to it. Then interesting questions arise. How long do you show an image? How can you make a still image evolve anyway?"

The opposite of transparent

Why are you so fascinated by slides anyway?

"Maybe because I associate them with my childhood? When I was little, we regularly watched our holiday slides, as many people used to. I found it fascinating how that worked: you shine light through a sheet of glass and bring a memory to life. At the time, slides were very modern, a quick and direct medium, literally and ﬁguratively transparent. In my work, I distance myself from that immediacy. For me, slides are instead mysterious and dark, the opposite of transparent. Photography is an attempt to stop time. It is doomed to failure but it is precisely that failure that fascinates me."

"I am intrigued by what time does to us. 'Glowachrome Garden' starts from my own slides, but it is not an attempt to recreate what I saw and felt when I made them, you cannot do that. By showing the images after and next to each other, overlapping and blurring them, I want to take the original experience apart, as it were unravel it and create a new experience, which at most indirectly points back to the first one. That intangible, that changeable fascinates me. My work is an attempt to explore that."

'Glowachrome Garden', Evelien Cammaert © Evelien Cammaert

Meditative experience

You briefly mentioned the soundscape that accompanies the images. You collaborated with Harpo 't Hart, a Dutch sound artist, to create that.

"Harpo has worked with sounds that reference nature but have been imitated synthetically. They also interact with the sound made by the projectors. If you spend a bit longer in the room, you can hear that they sound a bit artificial, a bit machine-like. You could say that they do not reconstruct an experience but construct a memory, just like the images. By the way, the images and sounds are both mixed live."

"There are three performers: Joris Perdieus, Alice Van der Wielen-Honinckx and myself. We are not only performers but also to some extent spectators. Sometimes we walk around, or sit down to watch the work along with the audience."

"Joris developed the scenography – the design of the screens and their arrangement in the space. He has positioned the screens and projectors to create a soft, open architecture in which the images as it were can breathe."

You also slide the projection screens. With extremely precise, slow movements - it's like a Japanese tea ceremony.

"Yes! I grew up in a house that was decorated in the traditional Japanese style. Japanese culture approaches things with great attention and care, and as a child had that. That precision is important in my work. I need them to create a slow, intense viewing experience. Sliding screens also refers to that constant mutability of the world that surrounds us, and how we physically relate to it. It is almost a form of composing."

"There is no predetermined choreography to that shuffling. Alice and I have precisely defined the order of the images but we decide on the spot when to show them. The same is true for the soundscape, we have a database of sound files but we decide on the spur of the moment what to play and when. As a result, each performance is different from the last."

Can spectators walk in and out freely?

"Absolutely - the full performance lasts three to four hours, which certainly might be a bit long (laughs). Some people want to experience it all the way through, others think half an hour is long enough. But feel free to wander out for a while, let the experience sink in and then come back." "I will be especially happy if people take the time to watch and listen. We are inundated these days with fast-paced, busy images that instantly demand our attention. 'Glowachrome Garden' aims to provide a counterbalance. If you take the time to let the performance sink in and you really focus on it, it can be wonderfully soothing. It then almost becomes a meditative experience."

Premiere at Playground

It will be your second time coming to Playground. Are you looking forward to it?

“Oh yes, very much so. I know that my work comes into its own at multidisciplinary festivals like Playground. I performed 'Grammar' there in 2018 with Joris Perdieus. Since that performance, I have remained in dialogue with the organisation."

"You ought to know that 'Glowachrome Garden' has in fact been ready for a couple of years. I was M-resident in 2020. M gave me a workspace in the Cas-co building for a while, to develop my work further. I put the finishing touches to the performance there. We were supposed to bring them to Playground shortly after, but thenCovid postponed the festival. I spent most of 2021 pregnant, so that put it on hold again for a while. I am very glad that we can finally bring it to an audience. Hopefully, we can show the work in other places later on. But the premiere is for Playground."

‘La Parade Moderne’, Clédat & Petitpierre © Joeri Thiry

The following artists are performing at Playground

Ana Torfs, Clédat & Petitpierre, Darius Dolatyari-Dolatdoust, Eric Minh Cuong Castaing, Esther Kläs & Gustavo Gomes, Evelien Cammaert, Hedwig Houben, Johanna Billing, La Ribot, Peter Morrens and Ruta Butkute

I want to see that!