6.30pm | PERFORMANCE

Anon, Hors-Série de Journal, performance (2024), 55 minutes
Simon Asencio, Matthieu Blond, Fredrik Floen
Lobby, Palais des Beaux-Arts

This performance is the result of a dialogue between two projects: *Journal*, an oral and gestural journal initiated by the choreographer Matthieu Blond, and the research project *Quire Whidsune* on medieval poetic and theatrical forms led by the artist Simon Asencio. This collaboration aims to develop a choreographic reconstruction of Virginia Woolf’s essay *Anon*.

In 1940, Virginia Woolf sketched out the initial ideas for a book she first titled Reading at Random and later Turning The Page. Her ambition was to create a ‘common history of literature’ through literature itself: a subjective work composed of biographies and narratives, to be read as a continuous flow. Although this project remained unfinished, the notes left by Woolf allow us to reconstruct the essence of her idea. ‘Anon’ is a prose poem-essay that tells the story of a protagonist, Anon, who, like an Orlando, travels through the ages of pre-imperial England to sketch out a shared and anonymous history of language.

This text, never completed, consists of notes, manuscripts and notebooks available for consultation in libraries across the US and Europe. Simon Asencio has been collecting these fragments for several years; he has translated them into French for the first time and has decided to ‘publish’ them through Journal. This production takes the form of a solo performance by Matthieu Blond, wearing costumes designed by the artist Fredrik Floen.

8pm | PERFORMANCE TOUR
By Mickael Berdugo, duration 20 mins
Lobby, Palais des Beaux-Arts

Image credits: © Halladora Magnusdottir  / Anon: Hors-Série de Journal, Matthieu Blond et Simon Asencio (2023). © Rachel Prat