A free body inventing its own gesture

This is a story about the body undergoing metamorphosis, driven by a tremendous vital energy and shown in an original relationship with the world in choreographic terms but also as part of a topical questioning about society. This relationship with the world is the outcome of several factors coming together: the environment, the mastery of an expertise, the specific imagination, economic conditions, the factor of time and, more than anything else, a holistic approach to the world. It is a place where the body's semantics are elaborated naturally with all the prerequisites this implies, opening up areas in which a remarkable body appears.

The female potters of Sejnane are always in the same environment; it is not a matter of choice for them, all they can do is work on this connection with the raw material in the ground around them. Developed by their living conditions and environment, their bodies - tools dominated by their day-to-day tasks and their expertise - have the power to express how their world actually is, to reveal its invisible side from time to time. Their art is linked to their deepest roots colouring a gestural expression. Their expertise is rich in gestural particles that have escaped the ever fermenting macrocosm.

Confronted with this aesthetic field, the body workshop held with the potters every morning was devised to make their bodies' imaginative world appear and be legible. The repeated gestures used to model a piece of pottery, movements involving their entire body in the landscape, collecting the clay, water and mastic, adapting their postures to grind the brick and mix and model the clay, and the long walks involved are all parts of the story of the body unleashing a singular way of being in the world.

As though it involved accomplishing an act of survival, every gesture is linked as much to the body's symbolism as its action. Dance or choreography is incorporated into all their actions, with the difference that here the body, above all the moving body, is the subject, object and tool of its own knowledge all in one. This generates another perception, another awareness of the world. That is to say that we were in the presence of all the components a dancer works on over the years to be in the presence of the "right" body.

These workshops developed an awareness of isolated parts of the body, of touch, of listening to the other person's body and the importance of feeling deeply the resonances of the aesthetic experience brought about by their expertise. This work offers an understanding of all the references and gestures on which their aesthetic fields are based and in which their activities are performed. Such physical experiences heighten the scale of desires. It is also about dealing with the body in a group like the construction of a body of your own through the perception of someone else's body, allowing a sharing of intersubjective experiences. Taking time to listen to your body, to massage it, to close your eyes, to experiment on your moving body: time they are not allowed because their bodies are "subjugated to tasks".

However this rough, almost naive body unconsciously worked on by their living conditions puts us in the presence of a free body, the inventor of its own gesture. With the female potters of Sejnane, "the subject's bearing" coincides with the subject itself, giving itself entirely to the gesture with the result that the poetics of their gestures produce the feeling of being present in the action. Their bodies talk like textuality, reflecting their thoughts, their pasts, their lives and their environment. It is dense and heavy with dexterous hands, each one of them having a singular presence. Through their moving bodies they carry impressions or traces that are reflections of a body that has passed through and released a state, a shock, a light.

Selma & Sofiane Ouissi