Lake Studios Berlin

Angie Flanagan & Yuna Masson-Cariou

Film created with Thomas Rolline

Music composed by Olivier Olier

The surrealists said that all art must be a dream.

But who’s dream?

Surrealism was born out of World War 1. Most of the founders had been soldiers and medics. Romanticism, already archaic, took its final gasp in the trenches. Industrialized warfare killed Nature, capital N intended, and it exposed, in its place, the great void of human unconsciousness. Heavily influenced by the Freudian movement, the early works of male surrealist artists often express Freud’s troubled relationship with women and their bodies. It wasn’t until the 1930s that female surrealists began to redefine their own bodies in their art, like Frida Kahlo or Leonora Carrington who famously said: “I didn’t have time to be anyone’s muse… I was too busy rebelling […] and learning to be an artist.” 

My research began by asking how a woman’s point of view might have been lost, historically, if it didn’t fit into the constructs of reality as defined in a masculine world. I was on the Paris metro and got off at the wrong stop. I decided to walk home instead. On my way, I discovered a little used bookstore and went inside. On top of a stack as high as my armpit, I found a small yellow book titled Attente by Henriette Charasson, a collection of poems she wrote for her brother after he was killed in World War 1. What I love about Attente is that it is not a literary masterpiece in a classical sense; rather, it is surrealist in how Henriette challenges her perceptions of reality, especially grappling with the concept of death. Her reality is not defined by the carnage of warfare but by her inability to comprehend it.

I began to develop one of Henriette’s poems, À Cam, into a performance piece. It was important to me to retain Henriette’s voice as a French author and her world, her reality. She is still living on the edge of the Romantic Era. Her world is the poetic cinema of French silent films, of romantic, sweeping music, and of Nature. It is in this context that she dreams of her brother and battles with the realities of his death.

Lucky for me, I am working with Yuna Masson-Cariou, a talented dancer who is as comfortable moving within the structured lines of ballet’s romantic era as she is deconstructing them.

Why is this important? The historical realities of women are incredibly important to understanding the mosaic of our humanity. But also, at Lake Studios, I always learn something profound about my work. It usually happens in the garden or at the kitchen table, talking with the other residents. This time, I learned that not all battles are fought in war zones. An empty chair symbolizes the place we often leave for those who will never return. The voices of seventeen women reciting the first line of Henriette’s poem in their own language, and the audience placing their empty chairs on the stage become acts of solidarity in memory of those who have fought and lost their final battle. In sharing this moment collectively, I believe we retain our humanity.

I don’t know if ALL art should be a dream, but MY art is a hand that reaches out to another, as Henriette said, across the ravaged countries that lie between us.