Guillaume Marie talks about his work Nancy

“The more you see it's fake, the more you believe into it, and the more disturbing it gets”

Guillaume Marie is a young French Choreographer who was born in Caen in 1980 and currently lives in Paris. He has worked with people such as Jan Fabre and the object theatre director Gisèle Vienne. He created his first performance Cracking your smile in 2005. From then on he has created work together with Jonathan Capdevielle and Maria Stamenkovic-Herranz and directed short movies. For Festival a/d Werf 2010 he will show a very particular interpretation of the death (and life) of Nancy Spungen, the wife and former groupie of Sid Vicious from Sex Pistols.

How did you become so interested in Nancy's death?

I started working two years ago with Maria Stamenkovic-Herranz, an artist from Spain who is now based in New York. The first event that we worked on was about the death of Joan Vollmer, William Burrough's wife. I was fascinated by that very famous event and by the way in which people were connected to it through their own imaginations. Through their own subjectivity, they rebuilt or reconstructed it. So, from this point onwards I decided to make a cycle of pieces with this idea in mind. The first one was Trigger, about Vollmer, the second one is Nancy and the third one is going to be called AsfixiA and it is going to be created in 2011.

With the first piece, we didn't have any images or any police report about the death so most of the material came from Burrough's books and other writers from the Beat Generation. Also it wasn't clear if her death was an accident or a murder. With Nancy I was interested in an event that happened a bit later in time, with the same amount of mysteries around it, so that we could have some more images and documents available. And the third one should be about an overmediatised event. But all of them are about how our own fantasies and our own subjectivity connects us to those events, and furthermore to what surrend us. What is important for me is to start from this reality point and to discover possible metaphors and symbols within it, so that the result becomes a visual piece, not a narrative work. I am not interested in telling Nancy's story. We dis-articulated the story completely so that we could rebuild it as a nightmarish journey. And in my opinion, this way we can get closer to the truth of what actually happened than if we were using details and anecdotes.

How would you like people to experience this?

At the point where we are now, what we created is very ambiguous and ritualistic. And I like that very much. The performer Suet Wan Tsang is representing Nancy's journey, and is also performing with Rebecca Flores, a make up artist . I was very interested in how this metaphoric journey can be interrupted by a more real action which is the application of makeup and special effects. So we are being hypnotized by what is happening to the performer, and then this is broken by a kind of making of, as if you were present at the shooting of a movie. And, at the same time, with Rebecca's work you always question what you are seeing. Sometimes it looks very fake and sometimes it looks very real. I don't think it is a very comfortable piece to watch to be honest, it is very challenging, because I ask a lot of things from the audience. I think it provokes a lot of questions about what you are watching and how to process it.

So you were not looking for a sort of alienation or Verfremdungseffekt with the appearances of the makeup artist?

This is funny because that it is how I thought it would be. But now that the piece is almost finished I am seeing the opposite, it actually creates a lot of tension. It is very interesting to see how the elements are articulating with each other. I am still trying to understand what is going on there. It's weird because the more you see it is fake, the more you believe into it, and the more disturbing it gets. It is very hypnotic to watch. A friend came to see it and said something interesting. She said the piece starts with death and then moves on to life, but somehow life seems even more fucked up than death. So all these distortions can be quite confusing as an audience member.

Tell me more about your process. How did you work so that you could accommodate this unexpected effects into the piece?

First of all I did a lot of research and presented it to the others. It is very important for me that people digest all this information because my work is about how you transform things with your own subjectivity, how you make it your own. We also prepared several things in advance with Rebecca, the makeup artist, and ended up having a collection of effects we could use. We did a lot of pre-production work, so once we arrived in the studio a lot of elements were already there: the stage design, the visual imagery for the projections, the music and the makeup. We then started to play with the elements and quite soon we began 'writing' the piece, in a way which was very similar to writing a movie script. We knew that Suet-Wan would go through certain states and pictorial moments but we spent a lot of time developing the transitions between those moments and the layers that could actually turn her into a character. We worked hard on building the psychology behind the character.

I find the mention of psychology interesting. Often people who don't want to deliver a story in a traditional way also shy away from any psychological aspect.

Well, I'm quite busy with Lacan at the moment, and this is what I understand by 'psychological'. I am trying to bring the three main elements of Lacanian psychology into the piece which are the real, the other and the symbolic. Because those three elements are articulated with each other and present though different forms or materials in the structure, I can say that psychology is all over the piece.

When you talk about this project, you also refer to the way in which faith has shifted in western societies from the religious sphere to that of fandom within pop culture.

When I started to work on Nancy, I suddenly found a connection between her and Santa Teresa de Ávila. And from this point we started to look at all the similarities and differences. Nancy was a groupie, searching for some kind of fame or adoration while believing in the punk utopia, and that state of belief is very close to a religious belief which creates an opposition that I find very interresting to explore. So from this point on, you can start using religious words to describe a rock 'n' roll story.