Next month and as part of Edinburgh Fringe, the first official Luxembourg Showcase of dance will take place, bringing together artists at the razor’s edge of performance.
As well as platforming the brilliant artists on its roster, Luxembourg Showcase is designed to support, promote and develop the Luxembourgish cultural scene and communicate its identity to the world.
We will be spotlighting three artists presenting work as part of this programme: Simone Mousset, Giovanni Zazzera and Jill Crovisier.
We sat down with Luxembourgish choreographer and artist Simone Mousset who will present her work The Passion of Andrea 2 at the festival. We chat about their practice and why they chose to present work at the festival.
Q: Tell me about your practice and artistic journey?
A: My work is concerned with articulating textures around the uncertain, the messy, the unresolved, the complex and with opening spaces of ambiguity to relate to not-knowing. I am interested in creating poetic and existential worlds, situated between fiction and a heightened reality that are also surreal and intensely playful.
My practice spans dance, theatre, comedy, visual art, magical thinking, drawing and writing, and I use those mediums to draw attention to the richness and depth of imagination, the human capacity to imagine new worlds, especially worlds that are full of unknowns. I am interested in dance and world building as a mysterious invitation to embrace what is unknown; as an opportunity to witness and experience rigorous imaginaries and strange qualities of presence that shift what is certain.
More than anything, I use humour and absurdity, always steeped in a visual sort of magnificence, to open doors that allow me to process existential questions with joy and lightness, that make it possible for me to tolerate and process their weight.
Coming from a background in ballet and then having gone on to contemporary dance, I was drawn to folk dance early on, and trained with ensembles in London, Russia, and Ukraine – most notably the Virsky Ukrainian National Folk Dance Ensemble in Kiev – and later worked with the Caracalla Dance Theatre in Lebanon.
While I went back and forth between ballet and contemporary dance, folk dance was a constant interest that seemed to combine the best of both worlds; a visceral physicality and joy of movement that often includes extended use of the voice, and a strong focus on musicality, precision, and form that was what I knew from my youngest years.
As time went on, I became increasingly interested in the voice and incorporated it more and more into my practice, so much so that I am now on an opera residency through the ENOA network at the festival of Aix-en-Provence, and I am very excited to enter this world and be in conversation with it in the years to come.
Q: What drew you to presenting work as part of Fringe 2024?
A: I have never been to the Fringe, and I am very curious as to what the experience is like. We have performed The Passion of Andrea 2 at the Avignon festival in 2021, and it has toured a lot in France, but I have always wanted to show this work in the UK more widely.
Many of our team members are from the UK or based in the UK but have strong ties to Europe, and there is this afflicted relationship to identity and belonging in a fictional world very much dominated by vagueness and uncertainty. It’s steeped in what has often been called a deliciously British or Monty Pythonesque humour.
What drew me most to presenting this very silly but, to me, very poetic and relevant show at the Fringe is the joyful, life-affirming energy I am hoping to bring to audiences. We have performed the show so many times now and yet I am still laughing out loud every time I see it. I think that the Fringe audience will really latch on to that humour and to this affirmation of lightness and existential silliness in a very heavy world.
Q: What can audiences expect when experiencing your work? What won’t they expect?
A: Audiences can expect to be surprised, and never to know what will happen next. The absurdity of the world of Andrea means that everything is unpredictable and can change its mind at any moment, and yet, there is a deep-running inevitability to everything that happens.
One of the main things about The Passion of Andrea 2 is that no one knows what to expect, not even the three Andrea characters themselves, as they navigate their unpredictable world in curly wigs. And yet there they are, and they have to deal with things as they happen and completely overwhelm and flabbergast everyone in hilarious ways.
As an audience member, if one can accept the silliness and playfulness that this show proposes, it promises to be an unforgettable experience in which the audience gets beautifully invested in Andrea’s plight, and fully immersed into the show’s world. Many audience members exit this show energised and revived.
Q: Who or what influences you the most?
A: I’m interested in the fabrication of alternative worlds, and I often begin with a taste for appropriating and deconstructing forms of popular narrative and culture, such as fairy tales, documentaries, poems, songs, video games, TV shows and, finally, ballets, operas, and other conventions and tropes related to the world of performance.
Each project is marked by risk-taking, provocation, irreverence, humour, surrealism, virtuosity of detail and, most importantly, the quest for the unexpected. My projects constantly try to reimagine the idea of using dance as a means of expression. Also, cartoons influence me a lot, as well as art and literature, but my influences are very eclectic. I think I am looking for a certain type of humour combined with a sense of poetry, as well as striking visual experiences.
Q: What makes art so valuable to society/culture/communities, in your opinion?
A: I believe in the fundamental value of art to a functioning and sensitive society. I have always been fascinated by how, since the beginning of time, people have stood up in front of others to perform, to shake, wriggle, jump – to express the intangible, or the only half-understood.
There is perhaps a sense that the performing and the witnessing of such acts might transform us: a transformation where the limits of our own imagination and experience are being expanded, sensibilities we didn’t know we had are being touched.
I revel in the human capacity to feel inspired and deeply moved when confronted with the limits of what we can comprehend. To me, dance helps us have a relationship with the ungraspable, the unspeakable, the unknown. The uncertainty around it and its fragility gives it the power of a magic spell.
The Passion of Andrea 2 will be presented at Assembly @ Dance Base from Tuesday 13 – Sunday 25 August at 7pm, as part of the Luxembourg Showcase:
https://assemblyfestival.com/whats-on/511-the-passion-of-andrea-2