There is a kind of tension or conflict running through Bottommost: it opposes institutions, frameworks, and established ways of doing things. How do you view this aspect of it?

When it comes to dealing with institutions, it’s tough being an artist these days. You have to constantly justify your worth. You have to fight to get funding or be included in festival programming. Economic scarcity means people are competing with each other. If there’s a conflict in Bottommost, it’s the struggle of our time: the struggle to live differently in a barren context. I don’t think that Bottommost claims to have the answers to this challenge. Instead, it tries to find some pleasure or agency in it. It views it as a contact point, a way to establish a connection with others. Because there will always be conflict.

In the work, we explore gestures that shift between playfulness, domination, and submission. We bump into each other, rough each other up, stick our faces in each other’s butts. Obviously, that didn’t happen on day one—it took time before we were able to push our limits. If I’d created this project with someone other than Baco, it wouldn’t have taken the same shape. The places that initially made us the most uncomfortable turned out to be the most creatively rewarding. I’m fascinated by these spaces of risk and consent, because they reveal the opacity of our desires and limits.

Your previous show, rock bottom, presented at MAI – arts interculturels in 2023, examined failure and humiliation as sources of transformation. How does Bottommost build on the earlier work?

Rock bottom was fundamentally a solitary work. The audience embodied the relationship to the other, in all its distance and impassivity. Bottommost, on the other hand, is more interpersonal. We wanted to explore a relationship between two people who would be able to become companions.

During the performance, you never really know what they are to each other. Are they friends, lovers, dogs? Are they meeting up at a cruising spot? We liked this ambiguity. That’s what makes it come alive. And communication is constantly put to the test. We speak but don’t always understand each other, so we try communicating in other ways: through sniffing, through singing, through feedback, through our butts. We experience what it means to come into contact without necessarily aligning in agreement.

You have a background in the circus arts, which you left to pursue dance and performance. How did that switch change your relationship to art?

I no longer felt artistically inspired in the circus arts field. I had to fit into a rigid framework, whereas in dance or performance, I can go in directions that give me more flexibility. Nevertheless, my body and mind retain the archive of the physical training I did. When I left the circus world, my attitude was one of rejection: I was moving towards the anti-spectacular. Now, though, I like to draw on my physical memory of it. I like sustaining an intensity that adds a touch of humour or absurdity to the performance. It’s part of who I am.

With regard to Bottommost specifically, Baco also comes from a circus background and we bonded over the feeling of never having found our place there. That awareness strengthened our connection and led us to new avenues of exploration. We felt the need to transform the raw energy we inherited from the circus into an intimate relationship that’s not afraid to be vulnerable.

Bottommost unfolds in a location that suggests a backstreet in a ruined city where anything could happen. What are you trying to achieve with the set design?

It seemed to me that this piece needed a DIY aesthetic. The set design reflects the economic crisis: artists have to make do with whatever they have on hand. We took that assumption literally by working with cardboard boxes and newspaper found near the studio. It also represents a countercultural impulse: we wanted to treat them like genuine artistic materials to find beauty in what is abject or dirty. To some extent, the mission of the show became how to reveal the sensuality of what has been thrown in the garbage. We found real poetry through taking this approach to what has been tossed aside.

I also have an interest in subcultures, in non-mainstream artistic or even sexual practices. I’m interested in the worlds created by queer subcultures like kink or pup play or rave culture, which I find especially vibrant. I take inspiration from them to rethink interpersonal relations—when you’re out at night under the influence of drugs and music, bodies come together differently.

Propos recueillis par Gabriel Cholette

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