Experiments in art and science

Since 2022, the Maison des Jonglages and the Atelier du Plateau have been working together to co-produce and present collaborative works as part of evenings dedicated to experiments in the arts and sciences. The public is invited to enter a laboratory where researchers and artists will dialogue and then share their practices and their knowledge through new forms between art and scientific research.

Juggling criticism of the sporting body – Johan Swartvagher (juggler) & Pierre Philippe Meden (teacher-researcher at Paul-Valéry University, Montpellier / MSH Paris Nord)

The stage is a meeting place. One defends a critique of the Olympic model and the sporting body as a paradigm of the Western, functional, scientistic body in terms of centimeters, grams and seconds. The other has been hurting himself since childhood through running and juggling, but dreams of taking part in the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympic Games. Between the sporting body and the poetic body, what perspective? Locked together in a circumscribed space-time, will they emerge from their dispute without a scratch?

Fear of the other – Dimas Tivane (juggler) & Frédérique Fogel (research director, Laboratory of Ethnology and Comparative Sociology, Nanterre)

Dimas Tivane is a juggler, musician and dancer.
Frédérique Fogel is an anthropologist.

Is their meeting arranged? Is it a reproduction or the result of multiple encounters?

Right from the start, she’s agitated by questions about the fear of the other.

Who is the other? Who’s scary? Who’s afraid?

How do you deploy this fear to deal with it?

By pausing for a few moments in the course of our daily lives?

In dialogue, exchanging testimonies, feelings, images, sounds, noises, words?

Putting situations we’ve experienced end to end, edge to edge?

Perhaps we could start by reversing our roles, to play out Dimas’ story…