Akademia: Performing Life

With : (-)auteur, Mercedes Azpilicueta (Pernod Ricard Fellow 2017), Ieva Balode,
Yaïr Barelli, Aia Bertrand, Raymond Duncan, Ieva Epnere, Barbara Gaile,
Daiga Grantina, Myriam Lefkowitz, Mai-Thu Perret, Andrejs Strokins

Exhibition from 01.12 to 03.24.2018
Curated by Solvita Krese, Inga Lāce (Latvian Center for
Contemporary Art) & Camille Chenais

Flyer of the exhibition

The Akademia, a com­mu­nity and a school that existed between the 1910s and 1970s in Paris, was cre­ated by Raymond Duncan and co-ran by Aia Bertrand. It aspired to create a new lifestyle syn­the­sizing art, labour and move­ment. Through archives, con­tem­po­rary art­works and arte­facts pro­duced by the Akademia, this exhi­bi­tion will look at nar­ra­tives and themes embodied by this school as poten­tial alter­na­tives to the estab­lished edu­ca­tion models and
modes of cre­ating and col­lec­tive living, while also ques­tion­ning the poten­tial and risks of such com­munes easily turning towards eccen­tricity
and rad­i­calism.

Dowload the press release

The exhi­bi­tion

Akademia: Performing Life looks at nar­ra­tives and themes springing from the Akademia, a com­mu­nity and school that offered courses in dance, art and crafts, hosted an art gallery, a pub­lishing house and staged the­atre and dance pieces between the 1910s and 1970s in Paris. Established by Raymond Duncan (1874-1966),American dancer and artist, and from the 1920s co-run by Aia Bertrand (1891 – 1977), a dancer, writer and expa­triate from Latvia, the school was a man­i­fes­ta­tion of their ide­o­log­ical syn­cretism blending socialist prin­ci­ples, the desire to revive ancient Greece and a “nat­ural” Latvian way of life. The exhi­bi­tion seeks to explore the ideas embodied by Akademia as poten­tial alter­na­tives to estab­lished edu­ca­tional models, modes of cre­ating and col­lec­tive living. Equally, it acknowl­edges and crit­i­cally details the poten­tial risks that such utopian com­munes, that mind­lessly follow the ideas of indi­vidual leaders, hold in shifting towards rad­i­calism.

Focussed mainly on actions them­selves – be they live art per­for­mances, gym­nas­tics lessons or phys­ical labour instead of con­tem­pla­tion, as expressed in the Raymond Duncan’s prop­a­gated phi­los­ophy called Actionalisme, activ­i­ties of Akademia were never sys­tem­at­i­cally doc­u­mented; now pre­senting many rid­dles to its researchers. Except for its monthly journal New-Paris-York where Raymond Duncan’s views on art and society are most clearly man­i­fested, the infor­ma­tion comes together as a puzzle inter­twining parts from the family archive in the US, sto­ries of Duncan’s rel­a­tives and fol­lowers as well as mate­rial from libraries in Paris and Riga. Within the exhi­bi­tion, archival research on Akademia is pre­sented together with new or existing works by artists who have been invited to work with the legacy of Akademia, Aia Bertrand’s life as well as the themes of alter­na­tive edu­ca­tion, self-sus­tain­able living or the link between arts and crafts. In working with the legacy of Akademia, his­tory becomes alive at the moment of its writing, weaving together not only facts but also inter­pre­ta­tions, mem­o­ries, sup­po­si­tions and most impor­tantly voices of con­tem­po­rary artists.

Akademia, at least in its early years, held a vis­ible, but often ambiguous posi­tion in the Parisian art ecosystem. Like many col­lec­tive utopias of the begin­ning of the 20th cen­tury, Akademia was nei­ther a place for living nor a school in a clas­sical sense, but rather a com­mu­nity of var­ious, fre­quently changing fol­lowers that gath­ered around
Raymond Duncan and his phi­los­ophy, involving them­selves in activ­i­ties like dance, music, debating, weaving or painting. Members of the com­mu­nity weaved their own gar­ments and pro­duced Greek-style leather san­dals and silk scarfs for sale, an aspect Barbara Gaile traces through her dyed silks. Mercedes Azpilicueta’s work echoes the syn­cretic vision of art devel­oped at the school with embroi­dered “scripts” which are starting points for the devel­op­ment of her per­for­ma­tive work.

When he was 17, Raymond Duncan designed a theory of move­ment based on the economy of work and aware­ness of the body during labour. He devel­oped a gym­nas­tics method intended to pre­pare bodies for dance but also as a sal­va­tion tool for humanity. Over the course of four work­shop ses­sions, Yaïr Barelli will work to rein­vent and develop these early the­o­ries through phys­ical prac­tices, such as yoga and dance, in order to create a col­lec­tive expe­ri­ence as well as a trace that could be called an « art­work ». In her work Equal Tense, Ieva Balode ref­er­ences dance prac­tices that reflect on the ideas of cross-cul­tural, sexual and human­i­tarian equality. Promoting a healthy, simple life, a return to nature, a dif­fu­sion of art in everyday prac­tices and a lib­er­a­tion from sexual and family norms, Raymond Duncan strongly opposed indus­tri­al­iza­tion, cap­i­talism and the bour­geois lifestyle and family, which according to him were the sources of the dehu­man­iza­tion of modern life. In Green School, Ieva Epnere chooses to work on ideas of alter­na­tive edu­ca­tion put for­ward through the example of a kinder­garten (the Green School), that existed in the sub­urbs of Riga from 1900, whose ped­a­gog­ical approach res­onates with that of Akademia.

Aia Bertrand with students at the Akademia, photographed by Raymond Duncan circa 1924. Courtesy : Duncan Collection

While Raymond Duncan’s larger-than-life char­acter often stole the spot­light, the exhi­bi­tion also high­lights the many lives of Aia Bertrand, whose role has yet to be prop­erly acknowl­edged. In addi­tion to being a dancer, weaver, editor of Akademia pub­li­ca­tions, Bertrand man­aged the art gallery, the weekly con­cert series, the sandal pro­duc­tion and often the the­atre pro­duc­tions. She was also a link to the Latvian com­mu­nity in Paris; for a while, the Latvian embassy was even hosted in the building of the Akademia, giving it a role in cul­tural diplo­macy. Highlighting the missing that often accom­pa­nies research, Myriam Lefkowitz draws thoughts on the life of Aia Bertrand through mul­tiple hyp­nosis ses­sions, then uses the cre­ated nar­ra­tives as starting points for a per­for­mance. In the mean­while, in her sculp­ture Ink waves cobble bread, Daiga Grantina ref­er­ences Duncan’s quirky and uncon­ven­tional public image and evokes the out­line of the couple he formed with Bertrand. The use of deep black, the bread and curves are a nod to the ink of the letter press, the daily life and dance style of Akademia.

Akademia often hosted shows and philo­soph­ical debates on issues they con­sid­ered topical to modern lifestyle or polit­i­cally engaging. (-) auteur evokes the spirit of Akademia, an open house for rad­ical cre­ativity, by acti­vating the exhi­bi­tion space with per­for­mances. Andrejs Strokins works with ver­nac­ular pho­tographs from the interwar and Soviet period in Latvia, looking for visual sim­i­lar­i­ties with per­for­mances held at Akademia, inquiring into how dif­ferent ide­olo­gies and polit­ical regimes can pro­duce sim­ilar aes­thetics.

As a counter-point to Akademia’s ini­tial utopian promises, Mai-Thu Perret shows part of her ongoing pro­ject enti­tled The Crystal Frontier, which focuses on a utopian fem­i­nist com­mu­nity com­bining rad­ical fem­i­nist pol­i­tics with lit­er­a­ture, craft and the avant-garde.

Exhibition view of « Akademia: Performing Life », Villa Vassilieff, Paris, 2018.
Barbara Gaile, La Verticale, 2017 and photographs from the Duncan Collection.
Courtesy: Barbara Gaile and Duncan Collection
Image: Aurélien Mole