Artistic Altitude Academy Performance - Becoming hybrid with lichen. © Laurent Chanel
Learning to be in a hybrid relationship with the natural environment, performing in high altitude, perceiving differently, decentering gravity… Laurent Chanel, passionate artist, performer, dancer and poet, offers all this and more during his cycle of Bivouac# open-air workshops under AAA (Artistic Altitude Academy). On July 25-29, participants experienced choreography and poetry in a 360° perceptual exploration of the Vanoise massif (and glacier) in eastern France. We joined the adventure.
Performing the mountain
The mountain makes you active. Even contemplation pushes you into action. Touching. Feeling. Opposing yourself. Inventing yourself. Suffering. All that is inside us, our body learns at each of these moments. Right before our first experience of performing in high altitude, Laurent Chanel asks us to do an exercise in conveying what we experienced during the ascent.
At the foot of the rocks at La Place (Leschaux pass, 1 936 meters), we are called upon to “perform the mountain”. We instinctively learn to “read the slope” (Vanina), to melt, to hide, to swim in the grass, to swim in the air, to “become hybrid with the damaged mountain” in order to pay it tribute in kind. We are “the hybrids of the damaged mountain” (Laurent). These moments of free expression are also times of geological, tectonic, zoological (especially entomological), botanical observation.
Here it’s not about being seen or judged. We perform, simply, deeply, intimately. We observe each other’s strategies, the sieves that are created between the various performative actions initiated by Laurent’s advice and the themes that the environment inspires in him. We are free to participate, or not. Of course, everything that is ecstatic is something difficult. We all go through various emotional states. Feelings of communion / rejection with nature, but also with the group. This is normal, we are mutating.
Ecstatic experiences
After our painful efforts, joyful sport and communion in creation. On the morning of Day 3 we wake up to fog. We dry the tents. Folding faster, better and better. Drying off, getting ready. We are at Fontaine Froide (2448m), which certainly lives up to its name of “cold fountain”. In the distance, Pointe de Miribel, majestic and inaccessible.
Experience 1
We explore the rock. Rock as an ally, rock as house. Omnipresent. But also plants, stubborn, pugnacious. Suddenly a marmot. We whistle together, the marmot and I. I am in tears. Cracking after yesterday’s efforts.
But I am still human
When will I become mountain?
Experience 2
Lichenification: Laurent reads us a beautiful scientific and poetic text on lichen. A plant living in symbiosis, inheritance of the ocean, mummification of algae. We are called upon to become lichen, to gain porous potential. By walking along, and then becoming hybrid with the cliff, we engage in observation (How does one observe? With which sense, which tools? Sight? Touch? Posture?) before engaging in association with our environment. Lichen is closer to algae and fungi than plants. “How does a mushroom think? I am mushroom, I am hallucinogenic mushroom, I am hallucinogeniclichen. I am the rock I make my bed.” (Lichens, by Vincent Zonca). Then regain our balance, gradually regain human form.
Journal of intellectual gymnastics on the green mountain
We had to bring a text. I haven’t prepared one. Except for the one I write every day in order to share this experience. Yet I am a man of text. But I have a book. Despite the weight, where every gram counts in a bivouac, I have a book. Murakami Haruki’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.
At the beginning of the novel, a man is stuck in an elevator.
Not much to do with the mountain, besides the elevation.
But in opening the book, I immediately come upon a passage that describes the man’s surreal descent into the depths of a cave. We are no longer in a building, we are underground, in a primitive environment. Dark. Inhuman. Humid. Deep. Like the belly of the mountain. I read them this page.
Always trust the text. Story of my life.
Xing reads us her text. She speaks of death. Of a solitary death in the mountain. She says that death is just as important as life. Humans end up welcoming it happily. Her diction has a particular rhythm to it. From elsewhere. And it’s beautiful.
Becoming river, surfing the firn
After the rock, after the lichen, we experience the flow of water, mountain rivers, lively, gushing, but always tributaries of gravity. Not far away, I get the crazy urge to roll in the grass going down the slope. Which I do. Good timing, as today’s exercise is descending the slope before becoming river. Remaining flush with the ground, at the lowest level, being a slope. Not easy, but exalting to finally let go!
Praticing the river is a total trance. An icy drowning. Desire to become water. Liquid future. Feeling of being where it’s necessary (finally). Smelling the river foam’s unique smell of pine and water. Feeling caressed like rock. Flowing, letting go. The performance lasts 20 minutes, but it’s not long enough. We all feel the same thing. Same with “becoming glacier” (in reality a firn, accumulation of snow at the bottom of a container) where we learn to appreciate the biting cold and the blessed heat of the sun, the wind’s caresses and the hybrid fantasies of our bodies in these elements. Realizing that we can feel good, even in uncomfortable positions!
We are less and less human
More and more mountain ice
King of the slide in panoramic trance
Whether evoking an anachronistic surf session in a Hawaiian shirt on a big rock overlooking the ice, or sliding across the moraine, I discover that I have a particular talent for sliding. This is confirmed on the uneven rocky ground where my companions struggle. These masses of crushed rocks in a constant state of imbalance provoke in me a crazy enthusiasm. I slide the moraine. Surf the rocks. Incredible sensation. Let go of fear. Total joy. Speed and confidence.
Further on, in a landscape that recalls the legendary angry mountain passing in Lord of the Rings, Laurent gives us an exercise in Altitude Panoramic Trance, a piece that takes the form of a participative protocol. On the steep ridge, in the strong wind, we turn around in circles and we perceive, discover, different landscapes at each passage. Terror of a black glacier, soothing Hobbit valley, a breath of fresh air from the void, or observing my companions in contemplation like me.
Creatures with night vision
If these experiences are emotionally trying, they are also fully gratifying. Reaching the camp is sometimes difficult. We have to prepare our food during moments of intense fatigue. At bedtime on the fourth (and last) evening, when Laurent invites us to explore the rocks that surround us, all lined in black and flush with the void, without a headlamp, in bare hands and feet, some of us are reluctant (including yours truly). Yet, and this is Laurent’s skill, once night has fallen and we practice a bit of marmot kung-fu (a variant of Russian systema), we feel warmed up again, balanced and ready to face the darkness.
The experience is extraordinary. It’s like “penetrating different layers of darkness” (Benoit). “Being here for millenia” and “belonging to a pack / group / brood” when we come together again on a rock (Céline). We also have “the impression that in broad daylight we would have seen if we could do what we did in the dark without hesitation” (Laurent). It’s almost impossible to distinguish between humans and rocks. We find “a group energy without seeing each other, just by feeling each other” (Stephanie). We “find gaps and stretches from the inside” (Muriel).
We are no longer humans
Almost completely mountain
Biennale of the damaged mountain
Last morning on the plateau, we prepare our biennale. Each one of us can invent a performance that stages our Queer doudou, a fetish object that we have brought along to activate in a specific place. This Queer doudou will help us to cross the border that separates us from the mountain. We rise above our human genre, here and now. This event has been a long time coming, and I won’t comment. I will simply share this text that I wrote for my companions of the ascent:
The past is never born, it is always to come
Attracted by the sound
Of rocks against rocks
I saw an abandoned creature
Become crazy from solitude
Screaming its sadness into the void
Further out an umbrella flower supple like…
Well then… rain!
Opened up as I passed
Still unsure if I really saw the print of the storm in the rock
I went on my way and I crossed a funny angel with iridescent wings
Just before glimpsing a frightening black shape emerge from the rocky ground
I saw a dance, hallucinogenic and propulsive
Blue lines in the sky
Then I fled…
Into the damaged mountain
To be sure, Bivouac#9 was quite a trip. Laurent Chanel is not lying when he calls it an experience. Each one of us went away invigorated, and disturbed, but rich with revelations. And we are not alone. We come back with an interior menagerie: hybrids, symbionts, critters. We are here now, with you in the present. No longer human. “Anything but human”…
More about AAA (in French)
Maxence Grugier is the Chronicler-in-residence of Rewilding Cultures, a project co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union.