SESSION #1

15:45 – 35 min.
Running with, running against: agôn as a cultural figure

by Michel Briand

Ancient Greek culture is as agonistic as democracy; “competing” is referred to as “agón” (as in olumpiakoi agónes), and dissentions, emulation and cooperation are essential cogs in the system. In Latin, (con-currere = coming together, competing), one competes with and against others. Agôn, which combines contemporary dissonance and resonance, echoes agonía (athletic strife, anxiety), but also the god Agôn, and agorá (assembly, market). Three types of agôn intersect: the kinetic space of rituals and festivals –where there are sports events, singing, dancing, athletic competitions, art, beauty, crafts. These games of concurrence and contestation are to be found in present-day Olympics, vogue ballrooms, hip-hop battles, social networks or other practices taking place in public spaces; in the ritualized temporality of games and theatre, in Athens in the Dionysiac celebrations, between tragedy and carnival; the space and time of trials. Antigone and Creon in Sophocles’ play are involved in an agôn (or joust) with the gods and the audience as their judges.

16:20 – 35 min.
Circles, challenges and battles. Emulation in hip-hop dance

by Roberta Shapiro

In hip-hop dance, it is customary nowadays to distinguish between two main fields – battles and the stage, competitions and creations. If this binary distinction appears somewhat simplistic, it nonetheless corresponds to an institutional reality. Ever since hip-hop appeared in France in 1982, a variety of formats have been devised, from danced confrontations to informal games and institutionalized competition. I want to propose a typology of these various formats and describe the complex relations at play in the two main processes of “artification” and “sportification”. Their intertwined nature is visible in the development of choreographed battles, in the polyvalence of hip-hop dancers who are both competitors and artists, in the end-less repetition that what these dancers do is art, or in the involvement in the ministries of Culture and Sports. I will conclude on the questions that the increasingly rapid “sportification” of breakdance is now raising for that discipline as breakdance is set to become an Olympic sport. 

16:55 – 35 min.
Capoeira Angola: a decolonial competition combining dance, sports and games

by Ana Rita Nicoliello

My paper seeks to contribute to the construction of the“cultural cartography” of a “socio-political history of sensibilities” proposed by this conference by examining the competition modalities of Capoeira Angola, a hybrid African-South American somatic practice which is both a dance, a sport, as well as a fight and a game. I want to reflect on the way this practice highlights decolonial ethical and political values, and therefore contribute to a critical reflection on the relations between the body and politics. From an analysis of its basic gesture, ginga, and its geo-historical aspects as well as its cooperative and playful logic, I want to explore how the knowledge and dynamics developed by Capoeira Angola enact a micro-political project which creates alternative spaces of ritualized emulation and the expression of a culture that has been marginalized by colonization.

18:00 – 75 min.
conversation with Laëtitia Pujol, lead dancer, Nathalie Péchalat, ice dancer, and Valentine Nagata-Ramos, breakdancer

Led by Laura Steil