How does a person arrives to an altered state, in order to activate that liberating quality of being when and while creating and presenting a performance? This is the quality Gaël L. is searching for in his experiment, ‘Ménade’. The inspiration was the image of the photographe et blogueur Dimitris the Athens, where a naked woman symbolises the modern Ménade, who in ancient Greece were nymphs at the service of the greek god Dionysus. Their name means the “raving ones”, which indicates the altered states in which they lived that included trance, hysteria, orgy. This quality of being, the energy it creates, is what interests Gaël L., and that is his search in TryAngle .
In the second day of the Lab, with a group of artists, he proposed to search for a way, a practice, to achieve that; giving continuity to the kind of aesthetic he usually works with – the naked woman, the image of the skin, blood… – and, at the same time, trying to find a different path and way of materialising his ideas. In the origin, the ‘Ménade’ photo, is a critique of the present Greece in crisis. And that is also the perspective in which Gaël L. wants to approach this subject in the end. In the spirit of TryAngle, maybe it will be possible to achieve a state of real freedom, expressed by an energy of dance, movement, expression, that has a correspondence with the ‘Ménade’, with a kind of trance and out of control movements. This may become a statement about the constraints, decadence and manipulation of the contemporary economical society we live in. And for the first day of experiment, in the stage of the theatre of Gare Franche, following a proposal from Yanniv Cohen, the group experimented a workshop in closed doors in which the group tried to establish a level of mutual confidence, of conscience of the body and physical exhaustion in order to have a shared starting point for future possible developments.