Member Spotlight: Yann Gibert (Lisbon Portugal)

Bio:
Yann Gibert’s body of work is situated in the exploitation of the perfomative moment for a revelation of its space/time context. His performances displace social rituals and collective memories in order to activate new fiction fields. In his pieces, the figure of performer takes the function of a revealing entity for the diverse actors building the moment: the coordinators, the participants, himself, the place, the moment… from his stage works (Yann’s primary artistic education is choreography) to his live art interventions we can draw a continuous line to the unknown. Still remains his characteristic insistence on the social fiction in witch his expected fiction happens.
Yann, considers his work development as an extension of a direct personal experience and observation of everyday life. Most of the times looking back and bringing the past to the present in constant re-evaluation.

1. Can you tell us a little about your work, your history and your performative concerns.
I’m a performer. I’ve been studying music first, then contemporary dance in Lyon and real time composition in Lisbon, where I still live…

My formation as a dancer took me to theaters such as Lisbon opera house, where I still dance sometimes. The the hyper-codification of art which was represented there, made me focus on the social ritual that represents such cultural events.

My performances constantly use that problematic “who goes where to see what?”, to reveal the different “actors” of that event. As if, to answer to “to see what?”, I would ask “to see who?”. I’m frequently starting from that use of the circumstances to create an intimate empathic dynamism in between the piece, the performers and the audience.
The interdependence of my interventions with their receiving contexts reveals my socio-political concerns which manage and feed my artistic activities. My attention to the event in its whole, through the observation of space mutations, underlines and interrogates the rituals that our occidental society keeps free from any economic justification, more precisely the questioning a cultural production situated beyond the level of lucrative entertainment.

Our need for fictional experiences that my work responds to, gets formalized through tiny temporal dislocations and intimatization of socially established codes, fictional in themselves. The “making visible” process is transforming those events into mise-en-abyme of our conventional daily fiction.

2. What are you working on now?
I’m into the building of a secret
(I’m writing a book that I will, then, adapt for a performance)

3. What are your biggest performative obstacles for yourself in this new work?
To write without thinking of the performance (yet)

4. What was the last piece that you saw that you would recommend to the Network and why?
THE PART by Antonja Livingston, an amazing equaly high level of performative involment and compositional cleverness… a master piece.