Photo: Estelle Hanania.
French photographer Estelle Hanania has been working with choreographer Gisele Vienne for over ten years. Working across dance, theatre, ventriloquy and puppetry, Vienne’s work is a potent concoction of the ecstatic and the macabre. Her most recent dance show, Crowd, for example, takes the early ‘90s techno scene of Berlin as its point of departure to craft a mesmeric exploration into humanity’s desire for euphoric and ritualistic experiences. Meanwhile, Hanania is fascinated by the body, the strange magic of its contours and its chameleonic ability to assume new guises. Through their mutual interest in the human capacity to transform and take on new roles—be it through dance and movement, ritualistic ceremony, or make-up and costume—Hanania and Vienne found kindred spirits in each other.
“Right from the start, we could see that we had a convergence of interests in terms of traditions, rituals, costumes, masks, identities, marionettes, anthropomorphic objects, and other, more subterranean matters. The sensitivities we found in each other’s work were what led to our friendship,” says Vienne with regard to their working relationship. For Hanania, meanwhile, she describes it as an “artistic affinity”. Now, the result of their 10-year-plus collaboration has been gathered into a new photobook compiling Hanania’s darkly enchanting images of Vienne’s work. It’s Alive! – À travers l’œuvre de Gisèle Vienne, out now from Shelter Press, captures the fullness of Hanania and Vienne’s creative encounter. Vienne’s performances provide the perfect subject matter for Hanania’s lens: pale faced dolls with creaking jaws; spooky puppets composed of idle limbs and hollow eyes; surreal stage sets consisting of fantastical creatures and dreamy snowscapes; wondrous dancers frozen in time, heads lolling and arms outstretched.
While Hanania photographed the performances on stage, her attention gravitated towards the moments off-set: the strange in-between moments, in and out costume, puppets in states of disarray. In this way, her images present an eerie convergence between real and fantasy: a breakdown between human and doll where the difference between everyday living and performance doesn’t seem so great after all.
See more below:
It’s Alive! – À travers l’œuvre de Gisèle Vienne is out now from Shelter Press.
All photographs courtesy of Estelle Hanania.