The Brooklyn Rail

Somewhere on the garrigue, on a scenic coastal stretch in the South of France between Aix-en-Provence and Marseille, among the rugged limestone cliffs and the sweeping pine trees, we encounter two dancers (Élise Argaud and Aloun Marchal) in an intimate pas de deux. They waltz elegantly across the summery meadow. Thanks to a brief close-up scene, we notice, in passing, that one of the two dancers embraces/holds/carries the other in an assistive manner. Shot primarily with a wide lens, this frame allows them privacy and a respite to continue their unhurried twirls. Such innocent portrayals of dance and disability like Éric Minh Cuong Castaing’s Forme(s) de Vie flicker seldomly across our screens—and if they do, it’s most often in the form of tokenistic documentaries that illuminate us about the affected individual’s everyday lifestyle, interspersed with expansive landscape shots and confessional interview segments. But not so in Forme(s) de Vie, where movement speaks for itself.

Forme(s) de Vie began in 2019 when Castaing, the then-associate artist at the Ballet National de Marseille, along with co-choreographer Aloun Marchal, dramaturge Marine Relinger, and the ensemble Shonen, partnered with La Maison, a palliative care center in Gardanne, France. Together with five La Maison residents and one external dancer, they developed a series of choreography workshops tailored to the performers’ individual abilities and conducted both on-site and in the nearby Parc National des Calanques. Victor Zébo captured the workshops on film, and, like the carefully choreographed sequences, his camera movements are sustained and mirror the performer’s tender gestures. While his close-up imagery conjures compassion and empathy in the audience, his wide lens shots protect the performers.

Similarly, discreetness and consent take center stage in Forme(s) de Vie, as not all the films of the series have been shown publicly. Of all participants, Kamal Messelleka and Élise Argaud remain the series’ main public-facing protagonists; they have consented to screenings of their work at London’s Whitechapel Gallery and performing choreographed sequences across festivals in Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Germany. A stroke rendered Messelleka, a former boxer, immobile. Kamal can no longer walk on his own but has regained some mobility through daily physiotherapy sessions. Argaud, a dancer with Parkinson’s, experiences rigidity and muscle stiffness in her every movement. Her sustained and concentrated gestures and steps, performed in her own time, echo Alison Kafer’s definition of “crip time.” Used primarily in the context of disability, this flexible concept of time allows Élise to inhabit new sensory spaces.¹ Argaud met Castaing through the Festival de Marseille; she is the only project participant who resides externally and will soon play the main lead in Marine Relinger’s forthcoming documentary addressing the uplifting effects of dance on her life with Parkinson’s. Richard Copans – Les Films d’ici is co-producing the documentary. Messelleka and Argaud’s portrayals in Forme(s) de Vie are unapologetic and real. Every hook or punch that Messelleka undertakes is accompanied by a puff and a blow. These audible gestures form part of the performance, display, and appeal of boxing, as if we expected Messelleka to visibly push himself beyond the limits of endurance, despite his physical frailty. Meanwhile, Argaud retains the effortless grace and poise of a dancer. Her concentrated and sustained movements are masterful and, even in discomfort and pain, they remain at every moment fully mastered. As such, these two portraits echo the characteristics and differences between sport and dance that Susan Sontag exposed so poetically in her 1987 essay “Dancer and the Dance.”²

With Forme(s) de Vie, Castaing tests a new choreographic method: up to three dancers of his Shonen ensemble act as human prosthetics at a time and rely on actual touch through skin-on-skin contact (SSC), as borrowed from neonatal care and contact improvisation, to intuit the La Maison participants’ movements and actions. They draw on their own repertoire of muscle memory at their disposal, like a catalogue of gestures, steps, poses, postures, and positions, which the Shonen dancers can harness to assist, support, and challenge the participating performers from La Maison. Take Argaud’s port de bras, for example. A typical pose in classical ballet, the port de bras (carriage of the arms) is one of the first movements a dancer learns. Ballet has up to eight different arm poses depending on the respective method. The scene in Forme(s) de Vie shows a resolute Argaud announcing that she will extend her left arm: “J'étends mon bras gauche.” Parkinson’s has weakened her muscles; Yumiko Funaya, one of the Shonen dancers stands behind Argaud and comes slowly to the fore, while taking Argaud’s head in both hands before turning it to the left in a slow and sustained movement. Then, Funaya places her right hand on Argaud’s waist, while she clasps her elbow to slowly extend Argaud’s arm until she holds her wrist. Funaya’s actions are gentle; it quickly transpires that she and the other two Shonen dancers are more than human: they are living prosthetics or exoskeletons. For they do not only intuit, but also support and challenge the La Maison participants’ movements. Like in the scene where Messelleka performs a sequence of boxing hooks from memory. “Gauche, gauche, droite, crochet, crochet, direct.” His body acts on reflex while he punches vigorously in the camera. For Castaing and Nans Pierson, who supported Messelleka in this scene, it was an experience of role reversal, of learning from Messelleka and drawing from his muscle memory as a repository. These scenes highlight the shared experiences of dance and disability, which require knowing the ins and outs of one’s own body.

A cinematic animator by training, Castaing first entered the world of choreographic notation in 1997 by way of hip-hop and Butō, as well as the choreography of VA Wölfl. Ten years later, he founded his ensemble Shonen. While collaborating with Alessandro Sciarroni on Aurora (2015), the third installment of the Italian choreographer’s celebrated “Will you still love me tomorrow?” trilogy (2012–15), the inclusion of visually impaired goalball players first prompted Castaing to research the relationship between augmented bodies and physical senses (touch, hearing, seeing). With Phoenix (2018), he tested echolocation as an educational means: Castaing and Shonen connected via webcam with Dabke dancer Mumen Khalifa, who, from his living room in Gaza, controlled a drone whose whirring sounds conjured patterns and steps of a traditional Dabke figure, which the Shonen dancers then imitated. Similarly, L’Âge d’Or, Castaing’s following project and a collaboration between Shonen and the l’Institut d’Éducation Motrice Saint-Thys, Marseille, in 2018, focused on evoking new sensorial encounters, such as the feeling of a gust of wind on a body, in children with motor disorders.³ The Shonen dancers transferred these empathic encounters both through VR glasses, as well as by carrying the children. Later, the audience also donned VR glasses to experience the emotions and emphatic encounters first hand and discover new realities. VR developer Chris Milk has previously hailed the experience of virtual reality as “the ultimate empathy machine” in his 2015 TED Talk.⁴

That Castaing has returned to the somatic body with Forme(s) de Vie could classify his choreographic practice as avant la lettre. For it predates prominent technological endeavors, such as ABBA Voyage, the metaverse’s recent choreographic milestone, where digital “ABBAtars” dazzle over the screens at the ABBA Arena in Stratford, East London, and imitate live performances by the Swedish pop group. The group wore motion capture suits to convey their movements to four body doubles, who, with the Royal Ballet’s resident choreographer Wayne McGregor’s assistance, learned to intuit their movements. Meanwhile, Castaing’s dancers have their own repertoire of muscle memory at their disposal: they can harness this catalogue of gestures, steps, poses, postures, positions to assist, support, and challenge the participating performers from La Maison, rather than merely replicate the movement, as is the case of the ABBA doubles. As such, Castaing’s approach constitutes a practice of refusal that grounds itself in the physical.

Castaing’s so-called “in situ in socius” method derives historically from what scholar Emily E. Wilcox identified as “dance as intervention.”⁵ This alternative mode of rehabilitation emerged in France in around 1981, after François Mitterrand’s election, when the French Ministry of Culture shifted toward a policy of promoting cultural pluralism (“métissage culturel”). Federal funds were set aside for projects that engaged with contemporary dance as a multicultural art form, such as the Five Cities/Five Choreographers program. Originally intended to ease or resolve social tension or problems in the 1980s, the Marseille edition of the project coalesced into a dance rehabilitation center.

By working on the intersection of animation, drawing, choreography, and technology, Castaing and his ensemble are stepping out of line—cue here the double entendre of line which, in balletic lingo, describes the aesthetically aligned (normative) dancing body and not just the literal meaning of the stepping out of line-expression. Liberated from the deficit-based mindset, which many other dance disciplines still perpetuate, the performers in Forme(s) de Vie are unafraid to test their bodies’ abilities and choices. They fall in love again with their every movement, from the sweating to the stretching, the pushing and the very effort of moving all over again. Theirs is a portrait of power and freedom, experienced unlike anything else. Returning to Argaud and Aloun Marchal’s spinning sequence from the beginning: Castaing’s background in cinematic animation and expert framing of the two dancers shows that it is indeed possible to capture the full reality of one’s disability in a discreet and yet unapologetically authentic way that fully exercises one’s physical potential. By forgoing reductive labels (like “integration”) and tactics, Castaing has imagined an inclusive choreography that celebrates dancing bodies as they are when they are not justifying their humanity to others.

At the time of writing, the documentary on Élise Argaud is in post-production. Future choreographic performances of Forme(s) de Vie will tour to Seoul (November 2024), Lisbon (June 2025), Ghent (October 2025), and Reykjavik (November 2025).

1. See Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2013), p. 27: “Rather than bend disabled bodies and minds to meet the clock, crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds.”
2. See Susan Sontag, “Dancer and the Dance,” LRB London Review of Books, Vol. 9, No. 3 (February 5, 1987), https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v09/n03/susan-sontag/dancer-and-the-dance.
3. Chris Milk, “How Virtual Reality can create the ultimate empathy machine,” TED2015 (March, 2015), https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_milk_how_virtual_reality_can_create_the_ultimate_empathy_machine?language=en.
4. Mark Savage, “Abba Voyage: The band's virtual concert needs to be seen to be believed,” BBC (May 26, 2022), https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-61592104.
5. Emily E. Wilcox, “Dance as L’intervention: Health and Aesthetics of Experience in French Contemporary Dance,” Body & Society, 11, 4 (2005), 109-139.