FORÊTS | jeannemordoj

PORTRAIT

In the world of performing arts, Jeanne Mordoj follows her path as an indomitable artist. Creator and performer of shows, she advances to the edge of theater, cabaret and circus arts, zigzagging on the line of the agreed and reasonable. In constant transformation, she listens to her instinct, appropriating in a singular way the unsuspected treasures of fairground shows.

On stage, she plays with her body from toes to fingertips - a legacy of her contortionist experience. She manipulates objects and raw materials - an extension of the juggling she practiced. Leaning on her voice through ventriloquism and other phonic fantasies. Finally, she draws - intimate practice, rooted in her for many years. Her carnal presence baffles and throws trouble.

With her, amazement enriches the imagination and the bizarre opens towards a poetic vision of our intimate identity: is it not secretly plural?

Today, Jeanne Mordoj invents a form of contemporary and intimate carnival art, to better face the strangeness hidden in the human being. In Éloge du Poil (2007) and La Poème (2012), a female character abandons the varnish of appearances and lets out in the open, at a gallop, an exuberant and undomesticated vitality. In La Fresque (2015), under the charcoal ‘s tip, appears the outlines of a furious female horde. In L’Errance est humaine (2018), the paper reveals the research of the artist following the convolutions of creation, in a fertile journey into the uncertain. In Le Bestiaire d’Hichem (2018), Jeanne Mordoj eclipses herself, to stage a duet where the energy of the animal comes to stir human’s nature.

The bearded woman, the hen-woman, the extralucid illustrator, the floating artist, the half-human half-cat creature, all assert themselves as free-spirited, generous and savage, malicious and serious phenomena. Strangers so like ourselves, riddles so close to us.

Naly Gérard, Feb 2019

Video