Perennial Gestures: Dances for a Manifest Hospitality. The P’tits Dej’s Solidaires at La Chapelle-Stalingrad, Paris

For one week every month, La Permanence chorégraphique, Gestes pérennes: des danses pour une hospitalité manifeste, engages in food distribution and for those who resort to it this is literally a question of survival. It fashions itself from the daily experience of hospitality. By what can dance decide to be affected, but also what does it think it is affecting, what does it really affect, and in what ways? What are the potential political implications of such choices? To explore these questions, we share what the choreographic action at P’tits Dej’s Solidaires is about, and why we are committed to it. The aim is to take the work beyond its local ground, and to launch a process of reflection that will proceed at the Lac to direct future initiatives. Three voices from La Permanence chorégraphique intertwine: that of Laetitia Angot, a choreographer and dancer, Chloé Kazemzadegan, a dancer, Marguerite Trabut, a dancer and researcher, interweaving with extracts from the testimonies of Anna-Louise Milne, Ibrahim Elkehal called Brahim and Jamal Al Fadli, all three participants in the dances. Dance can be political, and in struggle, because it is part of and reconfigures forms of social mobilization, but also because it gives rise to other collective, participatory and “transformational” regimes of action “towards the world as it might become”. It is no longer seen as separate from the world as it is happening, but as integral part of it.