REBECCA JOURNO / LA PIEUVRE

In Portrait, Journo pursues her exploration of gesture by integrating a sound dimension and juxtaposing it against images and their systems of representation. Composed for four female dancers and a musician, the piece explores the pose as a starting point of movement in all its variations and alterations. At the intersection of movement and the photographic medium, she has developed a choreographic style where gesture becomes both image and sound. Posing, framing, and freezing become principles of composition that interrupt, suspend, and fragment movement to produce a series of perpetually reconfigured living portraits. Facing the audience as they were examining their own reflection, the figures look at, construct, and reinvent each other in a disorienting interplay of mirrors. Influenced by the work of Cindy Sherman, Francesca Woodman, and Claude Cahun, this piece explores female figures in all their complexity, between multiple archetypes, fantasies, and identities. Bodies become surfaces for projection and spaces for fiction in which our collective imagination expresses itself. Like a gallery of images in perpetual transformation, these portraits in movement take the audience on a journey from the instantaneous to the eternal, and from the beautiful to the unsettlingly, even grotesquely strange. A space in which the image blurs and becomes matter, where gesture reveals its faultlines.