Choreographic interactions Léa Drouet
How can we bring human sciences issues into the realm of the sensory, the sonic, the corporeal and the material? How can we share aesthetic experiences that reflect different political and social issues?
The Experimental School
From 2021 until the end of the 2022-2023 season, Camille Louis, playwright and philosopher associated with Vaisseau, is working with Léa Drouet on the Experimental School project.
The proposal for an alternative school follows on from the creation J’ai une épée and consists of a horizonal and reciprocal system for exchanging knowledge. Artists invite the knowledge of those who, invisibly and “in small ways”, are inventing worlds and the structures capable of sustaining them.
We are talking about children, adolescents, the “troubled”, the elderly, exiled communities, people from immigrant backgrounds and other so-called “minorities”, generic groups whose singularities we never really talk about.
The “abnormal” school, on the other hand, wants to take on as teachers all those whom it claims to teach, whom it wants to train or normalise, and whom cultural operators sometimes consider as target groups.
This school is experimental because it takes as its starting point experiences, lived experiences that forge knowledge and resistance.
Its form also reflects this. To remain faithful to the singularity of languages and ways of seeing, doing, feeling and dreaming, the school is reconfigured with each session. Rather than a “class” organised in its own places and hierarchies, or a course that is always too limited in duration, school meetings take the form of long weekends punctuating the year and connecting with Léa Drouet’s creative work.
The individuals invited as teachers are people, associations and organisations rooted in the Brussels area, and sometimes people from abroad whose activities resonate with those in Brussels. The Experimental School is gradually building up a heterogeneous “public” that meets and intersects.
The school’s team stays in touch with each person, thus creating a period of time between each session and a community that unites permanent attendees and newcomers. This makes the Brussels area a “familiar” place, always ready to welcome a stranger, the unexpected, who has often been “right next door”. Each participant becomes a special spectator whom the artists often invite to follow the creative steps of the company’s artistic projects.
This continuity, made up of variations, is also supported by the work of memory and archive creation carried out since the launch of the school in collaboration with Magma, an association of young, committed citizen journalists. They have created a series of podcasts, available on Vaisseau’s website, which are also sent to each class participant every time they produce something.
Photos credits : © MaÏté Alvarez
To know more about the Experimental school
Web site VAISSEAU
