speculative practices in performing art [2023-2025]
and the social sphere [2026-2027]
A Research Project proposed by
Mathieu Bouvier, PhD in art, dance and aesthetics (University of Paris 8), Associate researcher at La Manufacture, haute école des arts de la scène - Hes.so, Lausanne
and Loïc Touzé, dancer, choreographer, and pedagogue, Associate artist at La Manufacture, haute école des arts de la scène - Hes.so, Lausanne.
with
Alice Godfroy, dance researcher, Université Côte d’Azur, junior member of the IUF.
Jérémy Damian, anthropologist, PhD in sociology, University of Grenoble.
Claire Vionnet, anthropologist, dancer, Assistant Professor Research, Centre for Dance Research (C-DaRE), Coventry University.
Yasmine Hugonnet, dancer, choreographer, and pedagogue.
Mathilde Papin, artist and researcher.
Julien Bruneau, artist and researcher.
A project developed within the research department of La Manufacture, haute école des arts de la scène - Hes.so, IRMAS.
The project is also supported by the Centre national de la danse, for its first phase [2023–2024], with Mathieu Bouvier, Alice Godfroy, Jérémy Damian and Loïc Touzé.
Introduction
A wide array of experimental practices are currently emerging in the laboratories of the performance arts (in dance studios, performance spaces, and research-creation contexts). We call these practices “fabulous techniques” because they offer playful and speculative ways of sensing, acting, and thinking differently. Divination, telepathy, clairvoyance, and trans-individual agencies are among the fabulations that inspire these practices, where the usual boundaries between subject and world, facts and fictions, artwork and artistic process are unsettled. The games these practices offer propose a transformation of sensibility and place relation at the heart of creation.
Parallel to the field of art, similar practices are also emerging in the social and clinical spheres—spaces where collectives care for social relations. These contexts likewise explore the ecology of relation through “speculative gestures.”
Investigating both aesthetic and anthropological dimensions, this research project proposes an inquiry into the “fabulous techniques” emerging in the fields of performance art and social clinics, with particular attention to their ecological and political characteristics. By studying their forms, methods, and conceptual frameworks, the research project aims to accompany the emergence of new possibilities called for by our contemporary time
What do we call “fabulous techniques”?
Techniques are processes, means and ways of doing things. The adjective fabulous applies to stories or things that "seem imaginary, that have an extraordinary, implausible character, while being real". Fabulous techniques are therefore ways of insinuating fiction into the structures of behavior and cooperation, by means of "perceptual intrigues" [Bouvier, 2021] or playful devices that serve as "traps of possibilities": clairvoyances , telepathies, savage hermeneutics...
Motivated by speculative bets, but governed by precise rules, these games promote the disengagement of habits, emulate the work of sensation and relationship and arouse trans-individual agencies. They thus make it possible to create performances or artistic experiences whose author is no longer one, butalways more than one *.
*“A body is always more than one: it is a processual field of relations. Manning, Erin, Always More Than One, Individuation Dance, Duke University Press, 2013, French translation by Emma Bigé and Mathilde Papin, to be published at PUF, Paris, 2023, p.48.
photo :Luck, creation 2009, Loïc Touzé. Dr. Martin Argyroglo