L'art de conserver la santé

When Ondine Cloez discovered the 13th-century treatise by the School of Salerno on the art of living in good health, she wondered: how can we imagine lost gestures? In this sung piece, she and two dancing accomplices interpret the aphorisms from the book, share a few thoughts and reveal what their bodies contain.

To cultivate the medicinal plants in her garden, Ondine Cloez unearths the Regimen Sanitatis Salernitarium, a popular compendium of precepts on healthy living and a manual for relating to the body and the world. These poems, written in alexandrines, deal with the common cold, sleep and passion for love, as they do with summer, cherries and wine, and are as familiar to their reader as they are to the doctor or the plant. The Brussels-based French choreographer and performer has teamed up with her friends Anne Lenglet and Clémence Galliard to create a vocal and choreographic score based on the work. Far from a historical or aesthetic reconstruction, they use language, their imaginations and their bodies as contemporary dancers to encounter medieval bodies and lost gestures. Continuing an approach begun in the solo Vacances Vacance, which focused on the relationship between movement and one’s own thoughts or with the literature that describes it, the artist sketches out a dance of absence and survival. Her interpretation of these bodies, their states of being and their emotions, is as thorough as it is undisciplined, and plays mischievously with the gap between what is said, what is seen and what is perceived.

Text by Mélanie Jouen for the Festival d’Automne à Paris.