Yasmine Hugonnet, Le Récital des Postures

Yasmine Hugonnet, Le Récital des Postures, Lilian Baylis Studio, January 19

Yasmine Hugonnet in Le Récital des Postures (photo: Anne-Laure Lechat)

Presented as part of the London International Mime Festival, Yasmine Hugonnet describes Le Récital des Postures as ‘a silent concert for one instrument – the human body’. As the lights come up in the silence of the bare stage we know from the program that the human form we see is that of Hugonnet but even if you know what she looks like this image would not corroborate that knowledge because her face is well hidden by her hair; under Dominique Dardant’s lighting her hair becomes a black extension of her black top and grey tights. She is standing in profile with her upper body bent forward, her hair almost touching the ground and her hands resting just in front of her knees. The longer she remains immobile in this pose the more our eyes adjust to seeing a living sculptural form with no passport-like identification. Hugonnet descends by subtle stages to lie prone like a stain on the floor recalling the shapes of Francis Bacon’s melting figures. She seems to empty into the shadow of her own body what once filled it. And then her two arms rise eerily from the shadows like two periscopes idly surveying the audience, her legs and flexed feet articulate the space behind her like beaks that Dardant subtly highlights, and her back ripples as if subjected to an invisible, childlike hand playing with a favourite toy. In this ‘slow burn’ evolution of postures Hugonnet intensifies the subtle stillness of being through the suggestion of touch, the thinly veiled threshold of pain, and the slow sensuality of sliding and crossing limbs.

Regaining her initial pose, she slips her black top effortlessly over her head to the ground. But how can you do that with tights? Her gesture immediately transforms to the utilitarian as she takes her hands to her waist to slip them off one foot at a time. At the moment she discards her clothes she makes an artistic decision that changes the development of the work; she can no longer maintain the formal approach she has used up to that point. Briefly after she rolls up her clothes, grey within black, and brushes them in a single abrupt gesture to the side of the stage, she keeps her hair pulled forward over her bowed head, naked but still faceless. But as soon as she unfurls to the point we can identify her she has moved from Bacon to Matisse or Bonnard; she has entered the figurative. She has also entered into the recognizable aesthetic of the female nude. She has, in a sense, let the cat out of the bag when she could have kept it inside to more effect, the cat being not simply the clothing but more importantly the self-identification. The abstraction of form and the blurred edges of autonomous movement that she evokes while covered are lost in her nakedness. Once set adrift on this broader stage, Hugonnet is never again able to disguise her identity, even though she pulls her hair in fanciful arrangements with hands and feet and even, in a whimsical gender reversal, twirled carefully and held as a moustache between nose and pouted lips. Where she had begun by forcing us to change the way we see her body, slowing down our vision to take in the full ambiguity of the postures she was making, she is now in the cross hairs of our sight and fleeing the newly-emerged clarity of her bodily form. She sets off on a journey of plastic shapes, borrowing from Egyptian friezes and dance vocabulary that through motion become sculptural fragments but she leaves us no time to take in her postures; her exposure has changed the dynamic of our gaze.

Intriguingly Hugonnet reclaims her original ambiguity through aural means. In the final section she kneels facing the audience in a single posture with a dispassionate, neutral gaze. Out of the stillness and silence we hear an eerie disembodied voice, animate yet inanimate for it seems to arise from Hugonnet’s mute posture. “We are going to dance together”, says the voice, “Let your imagination dance.” As she had once made us search for the human agency of her postures through our eyes, she now confounds our ears by being both ventriloquist and doll and challenges them rather than our eyes to search for the truth of her imposture.