Six dancers walk on all fours on the floor of the Red Rooms of the Louvre Museum, bottomless under the Coronation of Napoleon by David. In this gallery dedicated to large formats of historical painting, the brilliance of the battles and the pageantry is already revealed by a few undressed flesh, L’Odalisque by Ingres or Les ombres by Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta by Ary Sheffer. The six dancers walk on their bent knuckles and pant while lying on their sides. Like the lions they imitate. They are in the simplest device. Have we ever seen lions in their underwear? In this nudity, their human body joins the animal kingdom.
This “lion vocabulary”, choreographed by Xavier Leroy, is the last dance of a very special visit which takes place as part of the Autumn Festival, at the invitation of the Louvre. The public applauds, as does Laurence des Cars, president of the establishment. She followed the visit. A remarkable visit in every sense of the word, led by Estelle Zhong Mengual and Jerome Bel. She is an art historian, a normalist, holds a chair in Fine Arts and works on the relationships that past and present art has with the living world. He is a choreographer who practices a personal art of questioning: on a lot of intelligence and delicate humanity, he presses a zest of perversity or provocation, in order to put the tone of false naivety of the story in its rightful place. A story which, for years, has questioned dance in all its facets.
This time, the aim is to present extracts of “non-human” dances at the Louvre and to have them commented on by Estelle Zhong Mengual as an art historian, during a guided visit to the Louvre. How did we end up with lions being let loose ass naked in the red rooms? This is a slow progression. Sitting at the bottom of the stairs of the Victory of Samothrace, the public listens to the warning of Estelle Zhon Mengual, a beautiful brunette in her thirties, who will play the guide. “Making room for the living in creation and research means trying to keep up with the times: the ecological crisis that we are experiencing is in many ways tragic, but it has the virtue of showing us the toxicity of our Western culture,” she says.
We understand that Jerome Bel gave in to the call of this siren. Seized by the ecological emergency, this father has been committed for several years to practicing his art as a choreographer without getting on a plane. He has stopped touring, preferring to teach his pieces by zoom to dancers who will perform them in their country of residence, on the other side of the world. The invitation from the Louvre is an unexpected springboard for confronting nature and culture.
The first dance is an extract from the Danse du Soleil, Louis XIV’s first major role. Gaspard Charon in a golden costume dances down the Samothrace staircase. But this dance is that of a man who bends the sun into his image, observes Zhon Mengual. She announces Elisabeth Schwarz performing Water study by Isadora Duncan. But the vision of water, all docility and delicacy, and interpreted with a vestal costume, is still completely human, underlines Zhon Mengual. Follows at the foot of the Victory of Samothrace The Serpentine Dance of Loïe Fuller. The veil at the end of the sticks draws the shapes of flowers, pistils and clouds. Something non-human finally happens, which satisfies the speaker. We climb the stairs, interpreting as best we can, the Nelken line, the cheerful dance of the seasons by Pina Bausch. Having reached the summit, the guide gives a cold shoulder: this dance from 1982 may well be joyful, forty years later, there are no more seasons. Some species are disappearing. Hence the dance in memory of the Siberian Crane, taken from Extinction room (Hopeless) by choreographer Sergiu Matis. The rest belongs to the men who play the lions let loose in the red gallery, and regain a little of their animality, while waiting until there is only them left to remember the lions.
“Nature is a temple where living pillars sometimes let out confused words; Man passes through forests of symbols Who observe him with familiar looks,” writes Baudelaire in Correspondences, raising the forests to the rank of a work of art. It was almost two centuries ago. The superiority of culture over nature has taken a hit in the wing. Zhong Mengual and Bel undo the metaphor and highlight its sufficiency. The museum, a place of conservation of art, has captured what matters to men: namely the representation of themselves, their great deeds, their portraits. Landscape painting and still life are relegated to the bottom of the hierarchy of works. But who will preserve the non-human? Should we one day come and see the dances of Siberian cranes and big cats in museums?
The guided tour ends with a moment of total poetry. The young guide indicates that the man is coming out of the forest. Its opposable thumb allowed it to grip branches, like large primates. She turns to the portrait of Madame Récamier on her sofa. His hand, placed on his knees, remembers, in the hollow of his thumb, the trees of yesteryear. Here passes the forest… What a visit! In an hour, the museum took on another dimension.
