« Archers is a research on women’s place across the planet, nowadays and throughout history. This
choreographic and musical project questions symbolic, political, social and intimate equalities
between women and men, from – contemporary or ancestral – initiation rituals that mark out
people’s journey.
The root of this creation takes place in 2017 in Japan, while I was in residence in Kyoto, at the Villa
Kujoyama for 4 months. I met a group of women practicing Kyudo, a Japanese traditional art of
archery (litt “the way of the bow”). I was struck by the place, seperated between the covered space
from which women fired, and the one, grassed and illuminated by the moon and the night, in which
the arrows darted towards the targets. Women referees responded with shouts to women archers.
Here was a place, ancestral rules and rituals invested and shared by women, which figured a world
without men, and which I perceived as a fiction : a place of the past or a novel of anticipation.
A hint for matriarchy.
Coming back from Japan, I started a research on “mentrification”, a term which blossomed on the
internet a few months ago. This neologism refers to the “invisibilisation” of women in history. For
centuries, even millennia, women were deprived of the recognition of their knowledge, their
inventions, and the fruits of their researches.
I envision Archers as a piece of anticipation on the very old question of matriarchy as an alternative
organization of the world. This project is strengthened by a feminist and environmental thought and
wishes to recall the vertigo of our origins and our uncertain future. It aims to explore the history of
the world and to invent rituals of reappropriation of female gestures that have disappeared from the
official history of humanity.
I am working with 7 women coming from different horizons (South Africa, Taiwan, Japan, Europe …)
on modes of uprising which will find their anchor in fiction, into bodies armed by the bow and by
dance, songs and crafts. An archer woman is shooting in the name of all the others, into the distance of the past, seeing the future coming. Three musician women are playing on stage, joining electronic music to acoustic instruments.
Archers aims to overcome reciprocal adversity, and recalling the equitable memory allows us to
repair, to rearm together the future of men and women.”
Mylène Benoit
