Festival Parallèle 15, Autothérapie: Unbolting Colonial Statues from Our Consciousness

January 29 at 20:00
Friche la Belle de Mai, Petit Plateau

Danse, Performance
Duration: 1h

Co-presented with La Friche la Belle de Mai

Autothérapie: Unbolting Colonial Statues from Our Consciousness is a choreographic form of self-inquiry, unfolding in a series of (therapy) sessions: a non-linear selection drawn from several years of artistic research and an ongoing exploration of how memory becomes somatically inscribed in the body. The structure of the piece is inspired by Haitian Spiralism – a poetic and political way of thinking that understands history not as a linear sequence but as a cyclical, spiral-shaped process. In this sense, the work traces a geography of memories, traumas, and cultural references that appear fragmentarily and extend across three continents: from the forced displacement of approximately 12 million African people across the Middle Passage of the transatlantic slave trade – particularly brutal in Haiti – to the Haitian Revolution, the Jim Crow laws of the American South, and into contemporary Europe.

Biography

Mackenzy Bergile

Mackenzy Bergile is a Franco-Haitian interdisciplinary artist — choreographer, pianist, poet and researcher — whose practice explores issues of memory, domination and transmission through the body and gesture. Trained in traditional Haitian dance, African-American and contemporary dance, classical music and visual arts, he has developed a body of work that lies at the intersection of performance, theoretical research and postcolonial criticism. His approach is part of an aesthetic of friction and indiscipline : he challenges dominant narratives by invoking repressed symbols, reconfigured myths and subverted rituals. Through immersive and performative devices, he explores diasporic bodies as places of memory, political inscription and imaginary counter-power. His works have been presented in a variety of contexts—museums, festivals, educational institutions — and are accompanied by active critical thinking, notably within the Regard sur le Geste website, where he publishes immersive articles on the choreopolitical implications of living art and writing from the margins.

Crédits

Distribution

Choreography, dramaturgy, text: Mackenzy Bergile
Performance: Mackenzy Bergile
Artistic collaboration: Inès Mauricio
Lighting design: Eduardo Abdala
Costumes: Mackenzy Bergile

Production

Collectif FAIR-E / CCN de Rennes et de Bretagne, supported by the Ministry of Culture (Direction régionale des Affaires culturelles / Bretagne), the City of Rennes, the Region of Brittany and the Département Ille-et-Vilaine

Co-production

International Summer Festival Kampnagel; CCN de Tours / Thomas Lebrun; CCN d'Orléans / Collectif ÈS (as part of the Accueil-studio); Fonds Transfabrik – German-French Fund for the Performing Arts

Support

Project support ministère de la Culture (Drac/Bretagne) ; Support for artistic residencies City of Rennes

Premiered on

7 August 2025 at the Summer Festival, Kampnagel (Hamburg)

Parallèle 15 is about forty artists, performances, visual art exhibitions, screenings, readings, meetings, and partys.

Mackenzy Bergile
Autothérapie: Unbolting Colonial Statues from Our Consciousness

2025