Among the language elements of the #MeToo movement launched as early as 2017, many involve the voice, the way patriarchy has been able to “silence” that of women throughout history and the current need for minorities to finally be “heard”. Among the most overused injunctions: “free speech” obviously comes first, followed closely by “make our voices heard” by fighting against “manterrupting”, this masculine mania which consists in “appropriating the discourse”, in “speaking in the place of the other”. In retrospect, one may find it strange that no singer, musician, director (did we miss it?) saw earlier the extraordinary metaphorical gold mine offered by these ubiquitous turns of phrase in the public debate. But it took a few years and the whimsical flair of Swiss artist Yasmine Hugonnet to devote an entire piece to the myriad political subtexts contained in ventriloquism today.
chimerical beings
The principle of Megaphone is thrilling: all these militant terms are taken literally. Here, voices possess the dancers, escape from the bodily envelopes, are thrown like balls or vomited like poisons. They do not belong to anyone, seek their owner. Gathered in a sort of cave in the shape of eardrums and earlobes, the dancers transform themselves into pythia, oracles or puppets, more or less voluntary transmission belts for the messages of others – the others being, for example, this specialist in history of paleontology and representations of prehistory, Claudine Cohen, who notably looked at the male bias in our representations of prehistoric life. Then, a mouth screams in front of the public but the sound finally comes out at the other end of the stage from another body, linked to the first like an electric circuit.
At least these are the illusions that the piece seeks to create. They are sometimes memorable when they give birth to chimerical beings struggling to find their voice. They are sometimes messier, as it seems virtuosic – including for very good dancers like them – to always master the pitiless technique of noise artists and dubbers. And it is as if the difficult acquisition of this skill had been made to the detriment of the care spent cleaning up this room left here at the stage of interesting laboratory study: the appetizer seems too long, the nuggets too brief, the grotesque a little shy, the tracks certainly too numerous… The impression, in the end, that the sliders would benefit from adjusting so that the public can better grasp the frequency.