« Archée 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 Archée 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 9 women, dancers, singers, musicians; coming from different horizons (Taiwan, Chili, France …) on modes of uprising which will find their anchor in fiction, into bodies armed by the bow and by dance, songs and crafts.
Archée 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
Mylène Benoit presents the show “Archée”, scheduled for the 75th edition of the Avignon Festival in July 2021. A meeting moderated on January 12, 2021 by Michel Flandrin, organised by videoconference from the FabricA Avignon.
