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Fri 4 March 2016 (15h00), Sat 5 March 2016 (13h30)

Performance A Taxi driver, an architect and the High Line

EMMANUELLE HUYNH & JOCELYN COTTENCIN

France

A Taxi driver, an architect and the High Line is a film trilogy. This is a portrait of the city of New York through three characters and their relationship to space and architecture. The first two characters are human (Phil Moore is a taxi driver, Rick Bell is an architect), the third is a monument: the High Line. The High Line is metaphorically considered a person that passes through the city reveals and provokes the encounter between individuals and stories.
Films gather physical memories, stories and intimate spaces. Each of them moves between fiction, documentary, performance and poetry. The project is primarily a dialogue with each of the protagonists, a search through their physical memory and personal history. Gestures, movements, paths are identified and deployed in the city. They can be viewed as displaced in their original context. In counterpoint, the perspective on New York focusses on daily activities, work-related gestures and the rhythm of the city.
A taxi driver, an architect and the High Line is also an artistic adventure shared by a choreographer and a visual artist in which they constantly questions the field of one another. The danced gesture, as discreet and intimate as it is, is the tool for urban experimentation and definition. The video installation’s space and temporality become the support to be turn back into play in the dance performance.

EMMANUELLE VO-DINH
Emmanuelle Huynh has studied both philosophy and dance. In 1994 she was awarded a prestigious Villa Médicis hors-les-murs grant to go to Vietnam, and upon her return she created her first piece, a solo, Múa, This creation was the first step in her ongoing creative collaborations with artists from different fields.
She continued her choreographic work with Tout contre (1998) and Distribution en cours which places an astrophysicist and his research on black holes onstage with six dancers (2000); Bord, tentative pour corps, textes et tables, a choreographic project based on texts by Christophe Tarkos (2001); Numéro (2002); A Vida Enorme/épisode 1, a duo based on texts by the Portuguese poet Herberto Helder (2003). In Heroes (2005) she placed onstage heroic figures from our childhood; Le Grand Dehors (The Great Outdoors), a tale for today (2007); The Monster Project (2008) a dialogue of choreographic language created with the Japanese choreographer Kosei Sakamoto; In 2009, the creation of her piece Cribles at the Festival Montpellier Danse introduced a new relationship with music in the choreographer’s creative process; Spiel, a duo with the Japanese performance artist Akira Kasai (2012).
From 2004 to 2012 Emmanuelle Huynh was the Director of the Centre national de danse contemporaine in Angers (CNDC), where she implemented her project for this national choreographic center which is also an institution of higher learning focused exclusively on contemporary dance. The two programs of the school were offered to young choreographic artists, performers (the FAC program) as well as young creators (the Essais program).
In 2013, Emmanuelle Huynh reactivated her Compagnie Mùa, continuing her creation and pedagogical work as well as international and transdisciplinary projects. In October 2014 she created TÔZAI!... piece for 6 performers (whose her) at Théâtre Garonne in Toulouse. At the same time, based on an invitation from the French Embassy in New York, Emmanuelle Huynh began a two year project, A taxi driver, an architect and the High Line, with Jocelyn Cottencin, consisting of film portraits and performance pieces which will create a portrait of the city of New York through its architecture, its spaces and its residents.
Since 2014, she has been an associate assistant Master at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture in Nantes.

JOCELYN COTTENCIN
After studying both art and architecture, he turns to different domains in what is called applied arts – notably, design, architecture, and graphic art. Considering typography as a graphic and plastic material, Jocelyn Cottencin experiments it through different forms : performance, interventions in public spaces, installations, drawings, books, and scenography as in the work Vocabulario in 2007, created with Tiago Guedes, choreographer and I Can’t Believe The News Today, created in Pau (FR) in 2009.
He has been collaborating with Loïc Touzé for over ten years and has conceived the scenography of several pieces, such as LOVE (2003), 9 (2007), La Chance (2009) and recently Gomme (2011) and Ô MONTAGNE (2013). In 2009, he works with choreographer Emmanuelle Huynh for Cribles and in 2014 for Tozai … !. In 2010, he takes part in the project J’ai tout donné by Alain Michard for the Centre Culturel Colombier where he creates the « Centre de documentation ».
As a visual artist, he is invited by La Criée-Contemporary Art Centre, to develop over a period of two years a project between Bilbao, San Sebastian, Glasgow, Porto, Lisbon and Rennes, called Just a Walk (2008). He creates a series of photographs entitled L’objet du Désir for the Pôle Sportif of Quimper in 2009, a work based on archived sports photography. In 2010 he is part of the second edition of the Ateliers de Rennes – contemporary art biennial, where he coordinates the editorial project Journal d’Anticipation.
He conducted the project with La Criée and the FRAC Bretagne in April 2012 called Cela dépend de la façon dont les cartes tombent. For the event Voyage à Nantes, he developed a luminous installation on the Île de Nantes which was presented from June to October 2012 and during the Nuit Blanche in Paris in 2012.
Currently his work is shown at Musée national des arts décoratifs in Paris within « Recto/verso » a collective exhibition of eight artists exploring the problematic relationship between the graphic designer’s commissioned works and personal projects, and thus also between fine art and applied art.
His video project Monumental produced by the Musée des Beaux Arts de Calais, the Sainsbury art visuel centre of Nottingham and the FRAC Normandie is currently shown in these three institutions and aims to be developed as a performance with 12 performers. Founder of Lieuxcommuns TM in 2001, a work platform around graphic and printed art, Jocelyn Cottencin teaches at different French and international schools, and has been teaching at the Ecole Supérieure d’Art in Lorient since 2005.

infos pratiques

Passerelle Centre d’art contemporain

(?)
50 min
8€ ou PASS

distribution

Conception originale Emmanuelle Huynh
Films, installation et performance Emmanuelle Huynh et Jocelyn Cottencin

Production Compagnie MUA
Coproduction Les Services Culturels de l’Ambassade de France à New York ; Le Quartz, Scène nationale de Brest ; Passerelle, Centre d’art contemporain à Brest
Remerciements The AIA New York ; the Center for Architecture in New York ; the MOMA PS1 ; the Queens Museum ; le Musée de la Danse – Centre chorégraphique national de Rennes et de Bretagne ; La Criée, Centre d’Art Contemporain de Rennes ; Xavier Leroy.