Fabienne Audéoud (France)
Extreme Happiness
Rio Cinema, Saturday 27 May 2006
Extreme Happiness was a new commission for Wild Gift. It deals, as Audéoud puts it, with ‘an uncanny and ecstatic perfection, conceived as a piece of music.’
The piece was a performance lecture, incorporating a specially made film. This showed a week compressed and presented in fragments as part of the live performance. The film is set ‘in a beautiful place’ - a holiday beach in North Africa, where Audéoud, accompanied by a man of ambiguous relation to her, attempts to find the elusive ‘extreme happiness’.
The lecture told the artist’s life story, or parts of it: her upbringing in a strict religious group, the nature of depression, the lover who killed himself. Of the power of the dead, and the question of human happiness, here on earth and possibly even after death.
The quiet, passionate intensity of her story, told as if the audience were her confessors, from a lectern on the Rio’s stage, video and slides on the screen behind her, addressed her question as to whether the ‘extreme happiness’ which she says is the promise and heart of all religion, really exists.
Extreme Happiness sought happiness in the moment, in the elemental, in music and dance even while it reflected on the philosophy of happiness.
www.myspace.com/fabienneaudeoud
Thanks to
Charles Rubinstein, Camille (projection) and all at the Rio Cinema
