Despite the closure of places of culture, the University Service for Cultural Action of the University of Strasbourg continues its season, devoted this year to the theme of anthropophagy. First event of 2021, the reception of artist Merhyl Levisse in residence. Photographer and visual artist, he examines these new constraints and imagines a work private to his audience. Interview.
Mehryl Levisse is in residence in Strasbourg. The plastic surgeon, an experienced dancer, performs a curious performance, without an audience: First solo dancer. A dancer from the Opéra national du Rhin in two libraries. Not a spectator, but cameras and the screening of a film, condensed from the dance, during Reading Nights from January 21 to 24. This is an opportunity to dive into the gesture of an artist who abandons the spectacular to work meticulously on everyday impressions.
Rue89 Strasbourg: You compose photographs where masked characters are staged in closed spaces. The body is always the point of attention in your photographs. What does this theme mean to you? Anthropophagy: the taste of the other?
Mehryl Levisse: Anthropophagy is one of the first themes I worked on. Cannibalism, witchcraft, rituals, and how one appropriates the power and soul of the other in the cannibalistic rites of African communities. All of this is present in my work, through rituals and beliefs. Indeed, I start from a work on my body, on my identity, but a lot of things are added to it. I consider my body to be rather universal. It’s a neutral material that I can adapt. I do non-gendered productions, because I work on identity and self-construction.
I think my body can be any body, because with a whole bunch of tricks I can transform it. He becomes familiar. Since my first photographic staging, I have created closed spaces, without openings, doors or windows that would allow the gaze to flee towards a background. As we are in spaces with wallpapers and salvaged furniture, there is a very real impression. It gives the feeling that the scene is constantly being played out, that the bodies are locked into a kind of daily life, condemned to replay the same situation eternally. The bodies presented are often naked and masked in postures that make one think, when we look at the photographic staging, that the action has not yet taken place or that we are late. The spectator’s presence is constantly suggested.
My creations are not at all theatrical, even if I use codes from the theater since there are prostheses, artifices, false floors, false walls, a whole bunch of special effects. I do not retouch any of my images. Everything is real, including the lights. So these are very long process of staging, testing postures.
What is your creative process? As you work alone, you have to multiply back and forth between the stage and the camera.
An element posed in the staging is a photograph. Then I check against the frame. If the object is placed in the right place, it stays, if not I modify it again. I usually do 800 images. Sometimes, I already have a posture in my head, sometimes I have the setting but not the posture, and therefore, I search. There is then a long process of choosing which photo is the right one.
Does your passion for masks mean that you think it is necessary to hide the face to make a body universal?
Exactly. I think it works on two complementary axes: first of all, hiding the identity of the model, because the body that is photographed is a real identity, in its environment, in its space. And then, in addition to destroying this real identity, the mask allows the viewer to project himself into the image, in place of the character being staged.
The mask and the costume are extremely present in my work from the beginning. Even beyond that they have always fascinated me. The ceremonial mask or the carnival mask and everything that derives from it: community gatherings, sporting gatherings where you make up your face in the colors of a flag, all these staging of the body in a community make it possible to create a kind of block.
Usually, to erase the genre you hide all identification markers. But this time for First solo dancer, you play on very strong markers which create a contrast.
It is a dancer of the Opéra du Rhin, Pierre-Émile Lemieux-Venne, who wears the costume of a little opera rat. As my characters always have a parallel with a personal identity, it was important that Pierre-Émile and I made more or less the same sizes. I wanted to work on the color of my body, this flesh color. I became interested in classical dance academics. This salmon-colored jumpsuit, which has always been standardized for fair-skinned bodies, and not black-skinned ones. The costume consists of a mask, a corset, a skirt, ballerinas and gloves. It is a very feminine costume, but worn by a dancer who has a strongly masculine appearance. I wanted it to be a rather muscular body. It is important for me that, despite this very gendered pink color of the costume, we can question ourselves. He is truly a character made of dualities.
Why did you choose to place this character in two libraries, in these times of cultural closure?
Libraries have a function, silence, culture and duty. By placing a ballet character there, it is a first dialogue that will be created, and we will see what it will give. I created a character, which is this costume, and I want to give it some freedom. Apart from a few cinematographic shots that we worked on, I want the choreography to be free. It is important that he too appropriates this character, through his ballet dancer gestures. He will give life to this character that we both thought of. This is important, because if I delineate a choreography there would be little room for maneuver.
You have planned two performances of 4 hours each, at the National University Library and at that of Cardo. How are you going to deliver these films to the public?
Yes, we will end up with 8 hours of rushes. This will be used to edit a film, rather reduced, because I realize that the concentration time of a viewer in front of a video work is short. This 15-minute film will be shown online for Reading Nights, January 21-24. The idea is that the performance exists, and that this video is a trace of it. Performance is not video. It happened, without an audience, in these libraries.
In this residency, you encountered the most terrible constraint for an artist: being deprived of his audience. How do you cope?
This is my new job, since confinement and with everything the Covid has put in place both in the lives of artists, both in the non-possibility and in our society. It’s been almost a year that we are confined, that contact with the other is impossible, that we wear masks, that we can not get together. Supermarkets are open but museums are closed.
Suddenly I became interested in a question that was there in my work without ever devoting myself to it: does the viewer’s gaze give a value to a work of art? Is the Mona Lisa the Mona Lisa because the eyes of humanity have decided that it is a masterpiece, or is the work sufficient in itself? I think a work is not meant to be stored. All artists produce to be seen, so a viewer’s gaze is very important. Is a performance without an audience always a performance?
In addition to this performance, your residency plans to display one of your photographs on the wall of the Atrium, a building of the University of Strasbourg, although climatic conditions have delayed its installation.
Yes, in 10 by 7 meters. A photograph called The isivore, taken from a triptych, Anthropophagous and predator. It deals with food and how one feeds on each other. From an intellectual point of view, in a human relationship, but also nourishing when it comes to eating animals or plants. This photo is fairly free to interpret, with a character in underwear, on a bed, surrounded by a bunch of feathers. There is always this idea of feeding on the other and this ambiguity that suggests that we are what we eat.
Whether it’s with the photography you do alone or with this performance in the libraries, you seem to want to keep some distance with your spectators.
I did not become a dancer because the relationship with the public is something a little complicated for me. I don’t feel comfortable being staged like this. When I present photographic traces, performances, installations, the production has been done upstream. There is not this immediacy with the public that disturbs me enormously. In my performances, I perform for me, and that allows me to constantly adjust, to manage rather than to put myself in danger.
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