“Chorégraphie, BABY!” is a trial for a textual and performative riot against blind hermeneutics, against the dirty kitchens of performance semiotics. It seeks to make use of the recognizable discourse and language which is applied to the world of performance, and aims to tamper with the mechanisms of its specific value and signification systems. “Chorégraphie, BABY!” is rooted in the idea of ethnographic gathering which includes the making of a compilation of words and expressions coming from articles, books, radio critiques, the words and language used in workshop situations, interviews with colleagues, performance programs, writings of descriptions of works, conversations with artists, etc. This collected language material becomes integrated into a kind of typological scenario.

A well-developed and widely understood language surrounds all of the activities which make up our job as choreographers or performers. Performance is swimming in discourse and sometimes it appears as if the language itself is creating the guarantee for the value of a work, as if performance would not be able to exist without the de-codification mechanisms of written descriptions or instructions. The work happens through five axes of practice: Collecting Practice, which originates in the notions of ethnographic notes, database, repertory, dictionary, encyclopedia, inventory, and which will take the shape of an editable form in the future; Discourse Practice, which deals concretely with altering language daily as the generative linguistic mechanisms we ourselves are; Body Practice, which wonders about the communicating body; Drawing Practice, which questions categorization processes through the superimposition of language and image; and Performance Practice, which insists on improvisation as a way of working the relationship to the audience and as a material for disturbing representation itself. The episodes of “Chorégraphie, BABY!” were: (episode 1) “Liver Space Odyssey 22012,” (episode 2) “De Presse(d) Conférence,” (episode 8) “Strange Little Emergency,” (episode 3) “Long Distance Creationship,” and (episode 4) “The Janeline Slopes and the Brotherhood and Unity Orchestra.”

Our methodology can be described as dada-analytics, departing from the belief that the way we live, work, speak and write are significant ingredients which modify our activities. The language we use is shaping us, just as we are shaping it. What is our capacity to affect the world in which we live by paying attention to the way we speak, the way we use language, and corollary the way we create performance?

On our little divan, we will be busy making a micro psychoanalysis of performing arts. We seek to scratch the unquestioned fixity of this discourse and language, to shift the meaning of its signifiers, to unpack “les mots-valises”—not in order to build a better new word set, but to attempt to create a black and dangerous void through which anything new could arise.