"Employing every means of locomotion: ships, planes, horse, camel, elephant, but above all I walked, I went on foot, rucksack on my back from China to India through Tibet. I have contemplated many countries and at the same time examined the mental landscapes, as diverse as the physical landscapes represented by the philosophical, social and religious conceptions of the human spirit. This double exploration has occupied my whole life and will, I hope, continue to occupy it until my last day."
Alexandra David-Neel (1868 - 1969)

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A D-N au carré
Presentation at the Musée Guimet on Saturday February 17 at 8:30 pm
Click here for further information and reservations

A D-N au carré

Porter ses pas, venir, s'avancer, enjamber, s'acheminer, suivre, se déplacer, progresser, tourner, tourner en rond, partir, naviguer, évoluer, rôder, crapahuter ... synonyms for the verb to walk ... an organizing path for a choreographic canvas.

It was at the age of twenty that Alexandra David-Neel decided to become a Buddhist, just as the doors of the Musée Guimet were opening. Although she was not the only one to make this choice - many Parisian intellectuals of the time were discovering Buddhism and embracing it - she was the only one to go and study the original texts, and to this end spent 14 years surveying the Himalayan solitudes as well as the vast lands of India, Korea, Japan and China. This research led her to be the first Westerner to enter Lhasa, Tibet's capital forbidden to foreigners.

Alexandra David-Neel was a unique, independent character with a strange destiny, modeling herself on no one and identifying herself only with herself. She was a pioneer, an avant-gardist and a great scholar.

Three aspects of the personality and life of this woman, artist and adventurer, questioned me to the point of imagining I could use them as a creative medium.

What are the impacts and effects of the walking, sitting and meditation Alexandra David-Neel practiced intensely on our perception, action, imagination and memory?

A D-N au carré A D-N au carré is built by deconstructing. Doing and undoing. Never finished, always at work, always in motion, experimenting and offering itself.Inspired by the life and work of Alexandra David-Neel, and based on the skeleton of the DNA molecule.


A D-N au carré activates fire and listening. Phenomena of presence and vibration. On the bare stage, you enter once and stay until the end. A walk backwards, on the edge, that gives the metronomy of time and determines the spiral-shaped space. With Alexandra David-Neel's words, like a scansion, a pulsation with vibratory resonance.

"MY BODY IS LIKE A MOUNTAIN


The mountain is battered by the hurricane; my body is battered by the whirlwind of external activity. Just as the mountain remains impassive, unshaken in the midst of the storm, my body, "closing the door of the senses", can refrain from reacting with reflex manifestations of activity, while perceptions and sensations assault it like a hurricane.

MY EYES ARE LIKE THE OCEAN


If the ocean drank up all the images imprinted on its surface, having absorbed them all, none could ever again disturb the purity of its clear mirror. By allowing the images reflected by the eyes to sink to the very depths of the mind, until all forms have sunk, their shadows no longer disturbing vision, we can see beyond them.

MY SPIRIT IS LIKE THE SKY


In the empty immensity of the sky," he told me, "another day, clouds form. They come from nowhere and go nowhere. Nowhere is there an abode for clouds. They form in the emptiness of the sky and dissolve there, like thoughts in the mind."

Alexandra David-Neel in "Initiations lamaïstes, des théories des pratiques des hommes, 1930".