The present paper focuses on domaine nomade, a site-specific artwork by choreographer Laurent Pichaud, as it was presented at the Lesdiguière Hotel-School in Grenoble in March 2019. Laurent Pichaud is an experimental artist, whose practice explores perceptual experience, and whose creations often root themselves in spaces that are not specifically dedicated to dance or theatre. Domaine nomade is the generic title of a recurring project of his, mixing dance and visual arts. At the Lesdiguières Hotel-School, it was developed through an artist-in-residence program hosted by the Centre de Développement Chorégraphique National (CDCN) Le Pacifique in Grenoble, during which Laurent Pichaud immersed himself within the hotel-school and workshopped its corporealities with some students, who then became the performers of the piece. The result is a hybrid art form, at the crossroads of promenade, site-specific and participatory performance, where audience members experience a series of “intermittent immersions” into interwoven worlds that are all inextricably linked to the hotel-school.

While sharing decisive qualities with the range of work embraced in the term “immersive theatre,” starting with the fact that it is both experiential and audience-centered (Freydefont), domaine nomade differentiates itself from the strand of practice described by Josephine Machon as “fully immersive” (57) in a key fashion, in that it regularly breaks the moments of immersion it creates, thus preventing the absorption of its audience into the piece. At the same time, by “staging” non-artists, it reduces the gap between the piece and the audience.

Based on a joint analysis of the artwork, its production context and the choreographer’s words, this paper adopts a socio-aesthetic perspective to investigate the conception of the relationship between artist, œuvre and audience that is defended through this particular way of “plac[ing] the audience at the heart of the work” (Machon 21). My objective is twofold: on the one hand, to define the ends to which, in the creative process and the resulting art piece, Laurent Pichaud alternates tactics to immerse and displace, the latter both physically and metaphorically; on the other hand, to see how these ends fit with the values usually associated with the subsidised sector of French performing arts (known as théâtre public, even though it includes non-theatrical organisations). It is indeed my hypothesis that domaine nomade is indicative of a growing trend in this sector, that shakes up both the ways in which the performing arts are produced and presented, and the criteria by which their quality is measured. By questioning the discrepancies that exist between Pichaud’s legitimizing discourse and the principles that have underpinned the definition of artistic value in French public theatre up to now, I will be discussing the development of a new vision that uses immersion and participation to draw out relational dialogue.

Immersive Approaches to Nomadic Aims

Laurent Pichaud’s residence at the CDCN Le Pacifique in Winter 2019 gave him the opportunity to produce an artistic piece at the Lesdiguières Hotel-School with a class of 15-year-olds whose teachers had responded favourably to Le Pacifique’s proposal to develop artwork with the choreographer. A few resident volunteers were also involved. Every time he had the opportunity to work with the students, which was two days a week for three months, Pichaud immersed himself within the hotel-school. That allowed him to get fully acquainted with its different facilities, which include the training spaces, the residents’ boarding house and the comfortable student-run hotel. He would sleep in the boarding house, eat in the canteen, attend practical classes, and thus share some of the daily life of the students, to get a better understanding of the site and the ways it is “inhabited” by its users. Taking in the Lesdiguières Hotel-School in such a manner requires a state of perceptive openness which Pichaud has come to describe as a key skill in his practice. An important part of the choreographer’s work does indeed take part outside of conventional venues, in spaces which become the very subject of his work. He does not just create within them, but with and from them, which makes it necessary to assimilate altogether their physical and architectural qualities, their sociological dimensions and the memories and perceptions attached to them. In keeping with the definition of site-specificity given by Mike Pearson, this strand of his work is “conceived for, mounted within and conditioned by the particulars” of its site and the people it finds there (Pearson and Shanks 23).

That such work relies, during the creative process, on the immersion of the artist within a milieu he does not belong to, before inviting the audience to enter that milieu, albeit for a short time, during the performance, does not suffice to make it wholly immersive. According to Josephine Machon:

Immersive theatre is discernible as that practice which actually allows you to be in “the playing area” with the performers, physically interacting with them. […] The direct participation of the audience member in the work ensures she or he inhabits the immersive world created. (67)

Domaine nomade does introduce the audience into the same “playing areas” as the performers, and physical interaction does indeed take place, as we will see, between performers and audience, but the production does not compose a consistent world, with its “own order and logic” (Machon 27), that could give the audience a sensation of dwelling. Among the factors that prevent the audience from feeling like “inhabitants” of the hotel-school, one of the most decisive is their “freedom” (or lack thereof); while the activity of the school continues unchanged during the performance, and they are able to circulate among the students moving between classes and the hotel guests themselves, they are not at liberty to wander where they wish. They are collectively guided, in what could therefore be described as a promenade performance. In the choreographer’s notes, the piece is even introduced as a “guided tour through dance” allowing “to explore emblematic sites within the school.” By offering a selection of viewpoints on the objects they intend to unveil, traditional guided tours do not easily lend themselves to immersive experience, insofar as they maintain a distance between these objects, the guides and the visitors, while providing insights through verbal explanations instead of “sensual engagement” (Machon 75). Domaine nomade does however strictly differ from that traditional guided tour model. First of all, the guides are, along with the choreographer, the students who were involved in the creation of the piece. They are not in a position of exteriority, but integral parts of the site, which they give “an understanding of through a variety of sensitive bodily states—as students, cooks, receptionists, waiters, adolescents” (Le Pacifique). Secondly, the “tour” makes no attempt to explain anything; it mostly reveals the site through choreographing it, allowing the audience to see and experience it in ways which are intended to free the imagination attached to it. Through the different stages of the promenade, the activities the school is usually dedicated to are not shown per se, let alone reconstituted; they are poeticized, as the programme “in seven movements” distributed to the audience upon their arrival indicates, presenting the sequences to come via a blending of culinary and choreographic imagery. The “movements” do not aim to stage the inner workings of each location, but merely to translate them into new forms of corporal experiences. For example, in the “kitchen-lab,” the audience surrounds the kitchen counters, where a choreography with hands and flour unfolds, playing off the expressive and sensory possibilities of the technique and rigorous discipline at work within kitchen brigades. In another sequence, the audience are led in small groups into the intimacy of a hotel room, where they are told the story of a couple of clients who soon join them in the room through haunting shadow casting. The audience’s relationship with the action is thus reinvented from space to space, while systematically being framed in a tight proximity. Performers and audience members stay generally very close, sometimes brushing against each other, sometimes mingling. The audience are therefore given great access to the performers’ small movements and facial expressions. Their attention is drawn to the mutual dimension of proximity, as they become aware that their reactions and moves are in turn equally perceived by the performers and can have an impact on the performance. The audience are all the more conscious of it as the performers are non-professionals; they have not learned to control what they convey to the audience, so that their attitude sometimes betrays their discomfort and nervousness. We will come back to this uncontained dimension of the artwork. For the time being, I would like to underline the fact that those moments of fragility bring the reality of the school and the context of the production to the forefront. They keep the audience from being fully immersed in the piece, but they do not impede interaction. On the contrary, they tend to encourage it, as they make the audience aware that the performance is not “locked” but permeable to the audience’s reactions.

At other moments, the distance between audience and performers is obliterated. Indeed, in several sequences, the audience members become part of the action, the performers treating them as if they were hotel guests. Such fictional interaction is obviously informed by the actual location of the piece, as it refers to the professional realm of the school, but it nevertheless takes the audience by surprise; nothing in the publicity has prepared them for being entertained as clients of a high-class hotel. They are plunged into this fictitious situation from the second they enter the school building, where they are greeted and taken care of by a personal guide, who accompanies them to a sweet buffet. This experience is continued intermittently throughout the play, at the end of which they find themselves comfortably seated in the lounge bar, sipping a cocktail, while a concert of glasses and other diverse objects takes place around them. An immersive set-up thus structures domaine nomade, one that “draw[s] the individual audience member into the process of becoming aware of the full scope of the senses” (Machon 75)—with special emphasis, in an environment largely dedicated to catering, on the sense of taste. Although this immersive set-up is activated on many occasions, it is however regularly interrupted. The moves between the different “stations” of the promenade are indeed not dramatized, so that the audience members regularly revert to the status of outside visitors, free to talk to each other, to comment on what they have just been part of, if not to discuss the project with the choreographer, as I witnessed during the performance I attended. No attempt is made to “engross” the audience throughout the performance, as could be expected from a fully immersive production. This is prevented by the highly ambiguous nature of the piece, which is a choreographic performance programmed by a significant institution in the field of French dance, a guided tour of a hotel-school, an immersive experience in a hotel and the presentation of an arts and cultural education project all rolled into one. It regularly displaces the audience by shifting them between the different postures those situations bring about, allowing them to feel successively, and sometimes concurrently, like tourists, hotel guests, participant observers of a social environment, participants in an artistic process and of course audience members. In doing so, it fully integrates them into the artwork that would not be the same without them, while taking them on a “nomadic experience,” both physically and perceptively, as it makes them move between different locations and “different ways of being a spectator.”

A Risky Venture from a Production Point of View

If Pichaud’s piece is nomadic in nature, its production model is sedentary. The six pieces so far gathered under the banner of domaine nomade are site-specific in the strictest sense of the term: they are bound to the place they have stemmed from, and therefore cannot be re-presented in a different location. Although they are underpinned by a unifying ambition to engage the audience, and all undertake to do so through a promenade performance, each of them is unique, with very different choreographies, so that their production means cannot be pooled together. Having said that, production costs remain relatively modest, as they are devised exclusively with the resources available in situ. In the case of the Lesdiguières Hotel-School production for instance, the choreographer used the bare minimum of lights and technical equipment. Neither did he work with professional artists, using the students as his only performers. However, this cost-cutting is not enough to encourage, economically speaking, these types of projects. Not only can these pieces not be toured, but they cannot have a long run either, since neither their location nor their performers can be made available for more than a short space of time. All in all, domaine nomade at the Lesdiguières Hotel-School was only performed six times in the course of three days. Its format also imposed a very limited audience capacity of twenty-five people per performance. Eventually, due to the pedagogical framework it was linked to, Le Pacifique decided, in agreement with Pichaud, to make the tickets free. Needless to say that such a production model would hardly be compatible with the profit-driven mindset of commercial theatre. Yet, as we will see, it is not necessarily in keeping with the kind of projects French public theatres have been favouring in their programming either, although that reality may be undergoing a shift, which I will discuss later on in the paper. For now I would like to investigate the aspects of the piece that could trigger reluctance from public theatre institutions, the exception of Le Pacifique notwithstanding.

In the subsidised sector of the performing arts, productions are very much expected to tour, both for economic reasons and outreach purposes. That is the condition on which they can be widely seen. Many of the immersive proposals that have been developed in public theatre networks recently, such as Artefact by Joris Mathieu or 24/7 and Céto by Collectif INVIVO, are compatible with theatre black boxes and can therefore circulate around conventional distribution channels. Most of the off-stage work that is currently gaining ground in the programming of performing arts institutions is also conceived in ways that make it possible for it to tour. That also applies to site-responsive productions, inspired by particular places, that can be adapted to different sites. This is for example the case with Mathilde Delahaye’s “landscape theatre” play Maladie ou Femmes modernes, which was first performed in May 2019 in the commercial port of Valence (France), but which was then recreated for an old train storage facility near Tours in June later that year. Strict site-specificity is not however absent from the seasons of French public institutions, as it appeals both to their taste for unique events and their growing penchant to be more connected with their surroundings. This can be illustrated by the fact that situated tours or promenades by artists such as KompleX Kapharnaüm, Julie Desprairies, Philippe Ménard, Opéra Pagaï, BIÖffique théâtre, etc., are regularly commissioned by theatre and dance institutions. This quick survey suggests that the form of domaine nomade in Lesdiguières is not uncommon; it is therefore unlikely to act per se as a deterrent for performing arts programmers, so long as public subsidy permits to take it on. The same statement cannot be made about the fact that it is closely related to an arts and cultural education project.

Educational programs, and more generally actions related to audience development, obviously constitute a large part of the activities of public theatre, in accordance with its mission to contribute to cultural democratisation. Since the development of cultural mediation in the 1980s, practices to create a closer connection between artworks and audiences have taken a strong hold in the day-to-day of subsidised institutions. Artistic creation however remains their primary focus, as does their claim to be hubs for professional artists thriving for excellence. French performing arts institutions have indeed been cautious to differentiate themselves from socio-cultural approaches that have been, as Laurent Fleury highlights in Du Théâtre amateur (Mervant-Roux 51), largely discredited since the Ministry of Cultural Affairs distanced itself from popular educational organisations in the 1960s, creating a rift between amateur and professional practices. As a consequence of this cultural heritage, artists associated with performing arts institutions (or willing to be so) only involve themselves in work with amateurs or residents to a certain extent. Investing in them “too” often and in “too” conspicuous a way exposes them to the risk of being downgraded from the status of “artist-creator” to the one of “artist-animator.” Though this is gradually changing through the influence of artists such as choreographers Jérôme Bel and Boris Charmatz or theatre makers Ahmed Madani, Mohamed El Khatib and Didier Ruiz, who have been developing significant work with non-professionals, art produced with non-artists, particularly within a pedagogical framework such as the one provided by the Lesdiguières Hotel-School, has long been, as Pichaud pointed out in an interview, “either devalued by the artistic field, which considered them as third-rate work, or appropriated by institutions, which treated them as tools to encourage artistic appreciation.” For the choreographer however, domaine nomade in Lesdiguières is first and foremost an artwork that draws its value from its aesthetic qualities and the way it engages the audience. He is fully aware of how the students can benefit from such an experience as they develop their body awareness and deconstruct their physical habits, all the more as their immersion into the creative process mirrors his immersion into the world of the school. But the pedagogical dimension of his work is not what motivated him first, even though it was a substantial corollary to his creative approach. His primary motivation was artistic, which paradoxically helped him overcome the impediments related to the pedagogical framework he had chosen to operate within. Those impediments are not insignificant. In our interview, Pichaud particularly stressed the time constraints he had to deal with. While most of the students involved in the project did not have artistic training, which presumably called for reinforced support, the time allocated to the project in their school planning remained limited. Each of the seven sequences of domaine nomade thus only benefited from fifteen hours of rehearsals each, half of which were dedicated, as highlighted by the choreographer, to “motivating the students.” Contrary to professional or even amateur dancers, students have not been predisposed to collaborate with a choreographer. They can be reluctant to do so, as Pichaud experienced in the domaine nomade that took place in the Georges Lamarques vocational high school in 2014, in association with the Centre Chorégraphique National de Rillieux-la-Pape. In that venture, which is the closest to that of Lesdiguières in its process, the choreographer experienced very strong resistance from some students, whose comfort zone seemed particularly breached, and a few of whom ended up dropping out of both the project and the school. Within a very short time-frame, he had to revise his choreographic project, while watching over the well-being of the remaining students. As this can be seen as resorting to default options, one can only wonder why Pichaud would develop his artistic gesture in such a risky environment—and then repeat the experience in Lesdiguières—particularly when the constraints he embraces not only jeopardize his control over the piece, but also the recognition of it as a work of art. I will now analyse the reasons he provides and question how they play with the system of values at work within French public theatre.

Displacing Oneself, the Audience and Public Theatre Values

Pichaud justifies the risks he takes as an artist with projects such as domaine nomade at the Lesdiguières Hotel-School with two main arguments. First of all, he insists on his appetite for experimentation, which he considers to be at the core of his artistic identity. It is indisputable to him that working as an artist requires shifting one’s grounds, displacing oneself, so that one can bring about what cannot be anticipated. Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of déterritorisalisation appears to me particularly apt in describing the artistic process he seeks to engage. In a way that is somewhat reminiscent of the two philosophers, Pichaud is indeed quite interested in the influence that a territory—the environment shared by a group of people—can have on what bodies are able to do, because the “codes”, that is to say the rules, habits and logics by which that group secures a certain stability, inform their movements. What appeals to the choreographer in artistic creation is its ability to upend those codes and open up new possibilities for the body. This necessitates a déterritorialisation—a destabilisation of the environment, an evasion of its codes—which Pichaud provokes by moving away from the dance stage and immersing himself into new territories. He thus confronts different “codes,” which in their turn get “decoded” (destabilised) in the process. This is what encourages him to develop site-specific work, co-created with non-professionals, in the uncomfortable conditions described above. As the choreographer would have it:

Pure experimentation reveals things which are unfathomable. With these kinds of participants, in these kinds of risky projects, no one can anticipate the result. It is difficult, sometimes laborious, sometimes very painful to work like this. But it is the strength of the creative act.

If the means chosen by Pichaud, to deterritorialise—before “reterritorialising on the plane of [artistic] composition” (Deleuze and Guattari)—are specific to him, one can see that they are underpinned by an attachment to originality and unconventionality, which take from the “singularity regime” that has been defining the status of artists in our Western societies since romantic times (Heinich 2005). Those very values feature as decisive criteria in the appreciation of artistic quality in the world of French public theatre, which was built in the 20^th century with the intention of producing high-quality performing arts for all, and which progressively established its artistic legitimacy on the premise that its relative independence from the market forces made it the place to encourage artistic risk. In the world of public theatre, excellence is very closely linked to artistic audacity (Ruset and Folco 19). On that basis, the values asserted by Pichaud are perfectly aligned with the ones officially defended by French performing arts institutions.

The second argument brought forward by Pichaud is fuelled by a distinctive concern for the audience. Whereas avant-garde experiments are often perceived as insulating the artists by cutting them off from “common sense expectations” (Heinich 2007), the choreographer is adamant to extend the benefits of the displacements he experiences, not only to the non-professionals he co-creates with, but also to spectators. Convinced that pulling himself out of conventional arts territory has allowed him to improve his bodily presence and stimulate his creativity, he aims at opening up similar possibilities for the audience. This fully determines the artistic stance of domaine nomade. Firstly, it justifies the heterogeneous nature of the piece, that favours immersion, but in a discontinuous fashion, so that it is regularly interrupted. The “nomadic experience” thus created is intended to constantly unsettle the relationship between the performance and the audience, so that the latter question their position:

My big horizon of expectations since I started doing in situ projects: how not to reproduce theatre, which is a reflex we all have, whether as an artist or as an audience member. As soon as someone starts dancing or acting artistically in a public space, a frontal rapport or a circle are formed; some kind of spatial predisposition immediately reproduces what I call the theatrical code. It is to this end of disrupting inbuilt reflexes that I create arrangements that call for different states of being a spectator, through intermixing immersivity, frontality if necessary, mobility. It is a way of enriching the experience of being in a location. […] The body of the visitor-spectator becomes decisive: he or she has to develop their own viewpoints, and therefore find their own place.

Secondly, Pichaud’s ambition to engage the audience informs his choice not to collaborate with professional performers. The choreographer has come to believe that virtuosity and expertise tend to freeze the audience in a spectatorial posture. As he explained in our interview: “If I want to avoid recreating a theatrical code, I need to lower the spectacular tonicity of the performers.” This has led him to advocate an “equivalence principle” between the performer and the audience, which is very much at work in domaine nomade, where he both creates with non-artists and resists the temptation to magnify the expertise they are developing at school. If his choreography feeds upon the professional gestures they are acquiring through their training, he offsets those gestures by framing them in sequences that erode familiarity, so that they do not appear as expert. This is intended to reinforce intercorporeal connection, which is already stimulated by the spatial proximity between audience and performers. As some studies suggest (Wildschut), sharing the same space as the dancers and grasping the variety of their movements up-close tends to accentuate kinesthetic empathy. By choreographing widely accessible movements, Pichaud intends to make the audience even more engaged. As “everything you saw the performers do in Lesdiguières you could have done yourself: it brings the visitors back […] to their own corporeality and physical ability.” In a display that is manifestly intended to encourage the audience to re-appropriate their bodies, despecialising movement, in the sense of making it accessible to non-specialists, appears a governing principle. That very principle however can be seen as running counter to a criterion for artistic quality that has been an integral part of the development of public theatre in France, that is to say the display of exceptional scenic presence. The performer, in the fields of theatre and dance alike, is expected to demonstrate mastery over his art both in skill and execution; the art itself depends largely upon this condition. With domaine nomade at the Lesdiguières Hotel-School, Pichaud renounces this “arti-centrism,” as he ironically calls it, and welcomes the aforementioned “uncontained dimension of the work” which working with non-professionals unearths.

In spite of that non-conventional stance, domaine nomade in Lesdiguières was fully supported by the CDCN-Le Pacifique, not on educational terms, but as an oeuvre. This can be seen as an indication that the “social turn” in contemporary art (Bishop) is gaining ground within public theatre, in keeping with the trend analysed by Jen Harvie in Fair Play: “In performance and theatre, practices of immersing audiences within theatrical worlds and inviting them to participate there are no longer principally confined to their usual manifestations in applied performance contexts such as theatre-in-education” (1). Although some French performing arts institutions may program the pieces born from those practices at the tail-end of their seasons, mainly because they remain lukewarm towards approaches which they fear place social relevance over artistic quality, there are others, such as Le Pacifique, which give them a central place in the work they present and produce. The fact that Pichaud, who became an associate artist of the Centre Chorégraphique National de Grenoble in 2020, is benefiting from growing recognition in the French subsidised choreographic landscape after having been somewhat sidelined for many years can be seen as an illustration of that evolution. As performing arts institutions are increasingly urged by public authorities, civic bodies and art-world professionals alike to revise their position in society and make more space for the people, they grow more and more open to taking audiences outside of their walls and to boosting participation, not only among their public, but among local residents at large. The recent surge of artistic forms claiming to be participatory, immersive, or both, has given rise to a proliferation of calls from the venues encouraging people to “plunge in,” “engage,” or “participate.”

 

Whether one can conclude from those facts that a change of paradigm is under way within public theatre is a question that largely exceeds the remit of this paper, as it calls for a large-scope observation of the artworks programmed in the institutions and of the value systems they are both based and assessed upon. However, with the case of domaine nomade, we witness a change in the way the performing arts are considered; a change which may well impact their modes of production and presentation, but does not imply a radical reversal of the defining values of public theatre. Pichaud does not prioritise the creative process over the finished product, nor does he invalidate the question of aesthetics as some socially engaged artists tend to do (Bishop). He still stands for singularity and artistic quality – and his work is still valued for those reasons by Le Pacifique and the Centre Chorégraphique National de Grenoble. Domaine nomade urges a redefinition of the criteria by which artistic quality is gauged, by placing the emphasis, not on the polished delivery of the art form, but on the nature of the relationship created between the space and the participants (performers and audience alike) by combining immersive and displacing experiences. Performing arts institutions that open up to such aesthetic proposals do not overthrow the standards attached to public theatre. Like Le Pacifique and the Centre Chorégraphique National de Grenoble, who, incidentally, recently both pledged to “shatter the frontiers between genres and disciplinary boards to open wide our imaginary and make space for the immense possibilities of the collective” (La Trilogie, my translation), they nevertheless widen the field of practices to which those standards are applied, in a direction that currently favours participatory endeavours.