the surrealist happening
a performance directed by Pauline Mornet conceived with Alice Grace, and in collaboration with Taiyo Myrtil and Nolan Miranda, performed at the Centre for Computer Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), Stanford.
the surrealist happening originally began as a research project on the mid-20th century dancer Helene Vanel who is best known for her appearance at the 1938 International Surrealist Exhibition in Paris. Vanel’s performance, L’acte manqué, was described by Salvador Dali as a ‘hysterical mimodrama’. I was curious about how the performance may not have fully reflected Vanel’s own artistic voice, but instead, was shaped by the surrealist men around her — especially Salvador Dalí and André Breton — who were obsessed with images of madness and hysteria.
With my collaborator Alice Grace, we used archival fragments to ‘dance’ Vanel’s repetoire, comparing the grounded, intuitive style of Vanel’s early pieces with the more chaotic, almost puppet-like moves she was asked to perform at the exhibition.
this provided the framework for a workshop/conference in the Department of Performance Studies at NYU Praxis 2024, wherein I invited the audience to participate in the practice-based research project and join in dancing the archive.
It finally emerged into a performance piece at the Center for Computer Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford University in collaboration and with sound design from Taiyo Myrtil and Nolan Miranda. Together, we created:
The Surrealist Happening: spiral bodies
The Surrealist Happening is a ritual performance rooted in the lost, unarchived, forgotten figures of feminine, queer dancers that continue to haunt the movement. In this ensemble piece, we will begin with a lecture devolving into a performance in the listening room before leading a procession up the stairs where we will assemble our altar. We invite audience members to share their dreams and shed their disillusionments, as we ask ourselves - what does our surrealism look like?
Our performance on March 28th 2024 was at the intersection of happening and ritual, drawing on the dreamlike nonsequeters of surrealism but also interested in queering the relationship between audience and performers, aligned with the tradition of happenings.
We began our happening in the CCRMA ‘listening room’, structured with a soundsystem that circulates through the room with a soundscape performed live by Taiyo Myrtil and Nolan Miranda. Alice Grace had created a mannequin, as had the surrealists at the International Surrealist Exhibition in 1938, but rather than reproducing a modified feminine form, Grace had created a grotesque, monsterous body using different body parts from our close community.
The mannequin was then carried in procession through the building and up to the balcony. Those who had contributed to the mannequin were invited to take their object and we proceeded to throw it off the balcony to shatter onto the ground.
