Cédric Andrieux at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston

This evening, I attended a one-hour performance at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston as part of their current exhibition, Double Life. The title of the show and the artist performing it are the same: Cédric Andrieux. I went not entirely sure what I would see, only that the little bit I saw about it on Facebook looked interesting. It involved dance, so I really didn't need to know much more.

Andrieux is a soft spoken man---in the relatively small performance space of the CAMH main gallery, he wore a mic and was still sometimes hard to hear---and he actually looks a little uncomfortable speaking on stage. His delivery is unrelentingly deadpan, devoid of emotion. He does have a sense of timing, so all of this played in his favor when he related something humorous (or even if it wasn't inherently funny, as when he announced he would go offstage to put on---and later take off---a dance belt and unitard). He was, in short, charming in his decidedly low-key presentation.

He relates his early interest and drive towards becoming a dancer, despite not having a natural talent for it (or so he says). From seeing French broadcasts of the tv series Fame to seeing local live performances, he worked his way into education and finally a career that involved eight years with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.

This is the most fascinating portion of the presentation. He demonstrates the morning class the company took everyday, never changing, for eight years. He describes it as coming out of Cunningham's belief that everything is performed for the first time, there is no true repetition, and that he could occasionally find in it a sort of Zen meditation. More often, however, he found it depressing. He named the part he hated most, the one section he didn't mind too much, and described the ways his mind would wander. It is, in fact, a little boring to watch but a reminder of how much of preparing for art making is a chore.

He also notes that he joined the company after Cunningham was relegated to directing his company from a chair and was using the Lifeforms computer program to create his choreography. Andrieux demonstrated how this would work, which was painstaking, laborious, and often more than difficult for the dancer---it was sometimes an exercise in disappointment and perhaps shame that he could not always give what Cunningham asked for. Andrieux also noted that during these years, something always hurt.

These two sections, in his soft spoken, deadpan way, speak loudly to the hard, physical labor that goes into dance making. The tedious moments, the embarrassing moments, the painful moments that are invisible to most audience members are magnified here. For anyone interested, as I am, in seeing how an artist works to make art, it was riveting.

Throughout the performance, Andrieux shows us pieces of choreography, not only from Cunningham, but also from Trisha Brown, whose work he danced in his post-Cunningham Career at the Lyon Opera Ballet. He speaks to how her work was different from Cunningham, how it required him to find a more fluid way to move. Demonstrating it, I imagine, would be a revelation to anyone who things all modern dance shares a single style or vocabulary.

He performs all this without music except for the excerpt of The Show Must Go On by Jérôme Bel. The music is by The Police, "Every Breath You Take." The piece involved acting out the title of the song, so Andrieux stands close to the edge of the performance space and watches us, the audience, as lights come up on us. the fascinating part of this, to me, was that this was also the piece wherein he showed the most---any, really---emotion. He smiled. He seemed to enjoy seeing us. It stood out after all his neutral face performing. He had mentioned that in Brel's work, they were humans before dancers. His smile seemed to highlight that sentiment. It was good to see.

After describing all this, I have to close with the curious thing to me about all of this. Andrieux tells his own story, performs it all solo, but the show itself is credited to Brel. Part of the show is explaining how the show developed, much of, apparently, over emails between the two men, but it was Brel who shaped all the raw material that came out of Andrieux. That in itself was an interesting piece of process information for me.

I didn't go to this with the intention of writing about it. As the sparse postings on this blog demonstrate, I seldom feel the need to write about work I've seen. This show, however, had me humming throughout, fascinated by the stories, the demonstrations, and even by the efficacy of relentlessly emotionless delivery. As I said above, I was charmed by it all.

It compelled me to record these thoughts.