Habiter. The choreographer dance a solo in an everyday space, more specifically in the homes of residents of a city. She has set up a protocol. After scouting for locations and wandering through the city, she puts an ad in the local papers and on notice boards...
Habiter
The choreographer Latifa Laâbissi will dance a solo in an everyday space, more specifically in the homes of residents of a city. She has set up a protocol. After scouting for locations and wandering through the city, she puts an ad in the local papers and on notice boards in a few shops:
“Artist-choreographer looking for resident willing to host a dance project in his/her home. The proposition is free and will require 2 hours of your time. For more information, contact 06 .. .. .. ..”
After a preliminary conversation over the phone in which she describes her project and her way of working, Latifa Laâbissi goes to the home of the host of her dance. After talking and visiting the home, she defines the space where the solo will take place (the dining room, a corridor, the kitchen…). During this time, she observes the way in which her host opens his/her private space, “house” or “home” to a stranger, and makes a space available to welcome her. Without making any adjustments to its arrangement, she spends time in this space, occupying it. She lets her host decide whether of not he/she will attend the dance.
Latifa Laâbissi is accompanied by the video maker Sophie Laly and by the artist and graphic designer Jocelyn Cottencin. The films and photographs made at this time constitute the material for the second part of the project: viewing sessions at certain residents homes in order to watch the films together, that is to say an encounter between the team of artists, the residents and their guests, a moment together and a discussion around this experience. The film is a single shot framing a space and its objects in which the choreographer enters for a 10 minute solo performance. At the end of this time she disappears from the frame.
Dancing at someone’s home and filming this experience - penetrating into another person’s private space - provokes a variety of behavior. From the sharing of intimacy, to a feeling of being intruded on, to astonishment; the choreographer encounters the other and his/her way of organizing his/her living space. Her body movements, in interrupting the everyday use of these spaces and her status as a stranger, provoke singular narratives on the part of her hosts in which each participant reinvents him/herself and to which they bring their own idea of dance. The invitation may create slight states of shock or silences. The host is witness to this new use of the space in which he/she is used to moving, with its ordinary attributes - different layers of his/her reality are combined there: evocations, projections, fictions and memories.
For Habiter in Rennes, Latifa Laâbissi has invited Nadia Lauro to imagine a space for la criée that contains a potential for fiction, a space to be inhabited by the public. Architects and theoreticians also participated in the conception of Latifa Laâbissi’s project.
Opening april 5, 2007
La criée centre d'art contemporain
place Honoré Commeurec - Rennes