Twin solos in the making

On Monday 13th March, Frédéric Gies and Anne Juren met in Göteborg to start creating material for Jumelles! The 2 weeks-long residency took place at Skogen and will be followed by other ones in MARC, Inkonst and in Vienna. Premiere planned for the summer 2023 at ImPulsTanz.

Anne Juren and Frédéric Gies

At the origin of this piece is the 18 years long story of artistic collaboration and friendship between the two artists. Their collaboration consisted of participating to research laboratories, collaborating within educational programmes (DanceWEB, MA in choreography at DOCH-SKH) and performing together. They witnessed each other paths within the dance field and accompanied each other both professionally and in their lives.

In French, Jumelles means both “(female) twins” and “binoculars”. In Jumelles, Anne Juren and Frédéric Gies take on the task of portraying one another in the form of two twin dancing portraits: one danced by Anne Juren and choreographed by Frédéric Gies and the other danced by Frédéric and choreographed by Anne.

Their recurrent collaborations, their paths within dance, their common interests and their personal bond have taken the shape of a continuous process of twinning and mutualisation, which underlies Jumelles. Through the act of portraying one another, they put a magnifying glass on this process and on the historicity of their dancing bodies. In these interlinked portraits, the place of the portrayed and the portraitist are interwoven. It opens up a vast field of gazes in which the gaze is a dynamic entity involving the bodies of the dancers, of the portraitists and of the viewers.