NEWSLETTER
ANIMA Explores "Deep Time" and Natural Landscapes to Provoke New Perspectives on the Future of Climate Change
The PS21 Debut Marks ANIMA'S Only U.S. Appearance and Final Engagement
Chatham, NY – PS21, a vibrant center for contemporary performance in the Hudson Valley, presents the North American premiere of ANIMA, an immersive, multi-media installation of photography, large-scale moving image projections, and live aerial performance, created by French visual artist/photographer Noémie Goudal and theater director Maëlle Poésy in collaboration with aerial artist Chloé Moglia and composer Chloé Thévenin, August 31 through September 3, 2023.
A sensation when it premiered at the Festival d’Avignon in 2022, ANIMA grew out of Goudal’s earlier Post Atlantica, which was exhibited at Les Rencontres d’Arles that same year. It is informed by the artist’s fascination with recent discoveries by paleoclimatologists, who find concrete evidence from the remote past—fossils, pollen, carbon atoms—that permit them to understand today’s landscapes and form hypotheses about the planet’s climate past and future.
Most recently, ANIMA was performed in London in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall for three sold-out performances in July 2023, and at the 2023 Venice Biennale.
“PS21 approaches programming with an interest in how artistic form responds to the complex realities we’re living in,” said Elena Siyanko, Artistic and Executive Director of PS21. “We’re following the ways that artists intervene in the form, how they twist and turn it, how they challenge assumptions and stereotypes, how they continue traditions with both respect and subversion.”
Anchored in ideas around “deep time” (which can be loosely defined as a geological history of the planet), paleoclimatology (the study of past climates) and relational geographies, Noémie Goudal’s complex and performative series of films and constructed photographs reflect on the interconnectedness of human and non-human life.
“It’s fascinating that we can still see traces of our past in the landscape,” says Goudal, “How buried deep under the Antarctic ice are the remains of tropical rainforests, and today’s arid Sub-Sahara was once swampland dotted with palm trees. Paleoclimatology is a vertiginous oscillation between the past, the present and the future, because it’s by looking at the past that we can learn about the future.”
ANIMA, with its illusionistic installations and videos of natural landscapes, takes audiences along on that vertiginous journey. Weaving elements of visual arts, photography, music, large-scale moving image projections, and aerial performance, it references the climate crisis, but it’s also a reflection about time.
Images of palm trees that at first seem static, accompanied only by the sounds of birds, metamorphose, and the electronic music, composed by Chloé Thévenin, reaches a deafening pitch. Rocks crumble, flowing water appears to shred the canvas where it had earlier seemed a mere representation, the forest burns. One after another, the images disappear, until only the bare metallic scaffolding remains. At last the aerial artist (originally Chloé Thévenin; at PS21, Mathilde Van Volsem) appears, suspended from the scaffolding, spinning and sliding while multiple landscapes and timeframes move into and out of focus in the background, gradually morph, and ultimately vanish.
ANIMA, like Goudal’s other work, isn’t narrowly about climate change. According to the artist, it’s about how we perceive the world and our place in it, and is an invitation to reconsider our position within the world (as opposed to apart from it), and thereby reconsider our future in order to avert disaster.
“The time of the human race is but a mere minute compared to the time of the planet,” she notes. “During our life on Earth, we are effectively incapable of perceiving its movements . . . ANIMA is an attempt to change our point of view and perceive the world as it is intrinsically, by definition, in perpetual motion. It’s all about seeing the landscape as a moving entity. We see it as very fixed and very stable, but actually, it’s moving all the time. Even the Alps are moving, three or four centimeters per year.”
About the Artists:
Noémie Goudal
Noémie Goudal received an MA in photography at London’s Royal College of Art. Her practice involves the construction of ambitious staged, illusionistic installations centered on landscape, which she documents in film and photographs and into which she incorporates performance. Her interventions are grounded in research into the intersection of ecology and anthropology, in particular paleoclimatology, the analysis of climate and geology from the perspective of deep time, to explore the earth’s past and future. Her work has been presented at institutions and events in France including the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Les Rencontres d’Arles; Festival d’Avignon; Le Grand Café Centre d’Art Contemporain, Saint-Nazaire; Musée Delacroix, Paris; and internationally at the Tate Modern, London; Kunstverein Hildesheim, Germany; Ballarat International Foto Biennale, Australia; Musée des Beaux-Arts Le Locle, Switzerland; The Finnish Museum of Photography, Helsinki; The Photographer’s Gallery, London; FOAM Museum, Amsterdam; Whitechapel Gallery, London; National Museum of Contemporary Art, Lisbon; and the Horniman Museum, London. Goudal’s work is held in public collections including Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; David Roberts Art Foundation, London, UK; FOAM Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Winterthur, Switzerland; Kadist Art Foundation, Paris, France; Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, India and The New Art Gallery Walsall, Walsall, UK. Noémie Goudal lives and works in Paris.
Maëlle Poésy
Actress, writer, and director Maëlle Poésy is Director of the Théâtre Dijon Bourgogne, Centre dramatique national. She trained at the École supérieure d'art dramatique of the Théâtre national de Strasbourg. In her work, she pursues a “theatre of confrontation” which questions society and its individual components. She appears often at the Festival d’Avignon, Lincoln Center, and the Festival TransAmériques and has directed, among other works, 7 Minutes at the Comédie-Française, Glory on Earth, at the Théâtre de la Cité Toulouse and Théâtre en mai festival (Dijon), and the short film Sans sommeil.
Chloé Moglia (at PS21 performed by Mathilde Van Volsem) Chloé Moglia is a French trapeze aerial artist, choreographer, and dancer. Born in 1978, Moglia began her training on the trapeze at the École Nationale des Arts du Cirque de Rosny-sous-Bois (ENACR) and studied at the Centre national des arts du cirque (CNAC). In 2009, she founded Compagnie Rhizome, which she continues to direct. Called “the artist who explodes the boundaries of the circus,” her practice is equally influenced by martial arts. Her shows and performances play with bodies, slowness, the laws of physics, and vertigo. A defender of embodied thought and of a sensitive representation of physicality, she combines attention and acuity by weaving together physical practice, reflection, and sensitivity.
Chloé Thévenin
Parisian DJ and musician Chloé Thévenin creates work ranging from techno to confessional downtempo and blues-influenced indie rock. Her experimental, cinematic solo albums feature guitars, intimate vocals, and abstract song structures. As a DJ, she spins at clubs and festivals around the world, including Le Pulp and Lumiere Noire in Paris. She also composes classical music, soundtracks, and scores for art and dance pieces.
About PS21 Performance Spaces for the 21st Century
A vibrant center for contemporary performance in the Hudson Valley, PS21 “presents work that challenges and invites” (The New York Times): adventurous productions by leading and emerging American and international artists in music, dance, and theater, and visionaries creating entirely new genres. On our open-air Pavilion Theater stage, across our expansive, unspoiled grounds, and in the diverse surrounding communities, PS21 cultivates and presents productions that transcend aesthetic boundaries and revitalize existing artistic languages and grammars. Throughout the year, we host developmental residencies for dancers, musicians, actors, and creators of original, even unclassifiable new work. Rooted in community collaboration, PS21’s programming engages creatively with critical global and social issues. It is a mecca for innovative and original artistic voices, a destination for performance that can be experienced nowhere else in the region.
PS21’s Pavilion Theater is a green-energy marvel surrounded by 100 acres of unspoiled meadows, trails, and woodlands that are a haven to wildlife and visitors across the region. Integrated into our unspoiled campus, the theater embodies our commitments to the public: open, inviting, and optimized for their enjoyment and encouraging citizen expression and participation.
PS21 and the Environment
The presentation of ANIMA continues PS21’s commitment to programming that raises questions or addresses the need for action around environmental preservation, global warming, and the quest for a sustainable future. Since 2020, we have featured productions from around the globe that tackled these themes in works of the highest artistic caliber. Highlights of our 2022 season included Philippe Quesne’s ecological fable Farm Fatale (from France); the Israeli Vertigo Dance Company in One. One & One, a vision of sustainability; Bang on a Can All-Stars cofounder Michael Gordon’s Field of Vision – 36 Percussionists performing on PS21’s rolling landscape; and a screening of Earth, Oleksandr Dovzhenko’s masterly 1930 critique of the collectivization of Ukrainian farms, to live accompaniment by DakhaBrakha, the Ukrainian ethno-chaos band.
In 2021, we brought Heartbeat Opera’s The Extinctionist to PS21, a cautionary vision of a future threatened by rising sea levels, and in 2020 the New York State premiere of John Luther Adams’s Ten Thousand Birds (2020). These and other performances took place in PS21’s Pavilion Theater, a green-energy marvel surrounded by 100 acres of unspoiled meadows, trails, and woodlands that are a haven to wildlife and visitors across the region. Integrated into the unspoiled campus, the theater embodies PS21’s commitments to the public: open, inviting, and optimized for their enjoyment, encouraging citizen expression and participation.
In 2022, PS21’s adventurous summer season embraced genres and companies from around the globe, 19 productions in four months, including seven from South Korea, Nigeria, Haiti, Canada, France, Israel, and Ukraine, with programs that address challenging contemporary issues. A number of the works were presented as part of PATHWAYS, PS21’s ambitious, multi-faceted series of spectacle, performances, art installations, international contemporary circus, and participatory events connecting nature and the arts. They included Farm Fatale, Field of Vision, and Compagnie Galmae’s C’est pas là, c’est par là (It’s not here, it’s over here). Writing about Farm Fatale, New York Times critic at large Jason Farago said “’It’s not easy being green. Full marks to Philippe Quesne’s sprightly eco-clown show ‘Farm Fatale,’ at PS21 in Chatham, N.Y. — a country theater that outclasses most of Manhattan.”
Support
The production/performances of ANIMA received support from Villa Albertine
Additionally, this engagement is supported by The Audience Building Project, a program of the Lake Placid Center for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts with support from the Governor and New York State Legislature.
Tickets
Reserved Seating: $45
Student Tickets: $10
September 2 Dinner & Show Package: $150
Order Tickets
September 2 Dinner and a Show Package
Dinner 6 PM
Show 8 PM
On September 2, enjoy a pre-show family-style, farm-to-table dinner en plein air on our beautiful 100-acre campus. Limited tickets available. For more information or to make reservations, visit PS21.org.
Visiting PS21
Performance Spaces for the 21st Century, a state-of-the art venue on 100 acres of unspoiled meadows, trails, and woodlands in the heart of the Hudson Valley.
Accessibility
PS21’s theater is fully accessible and reservations for wheelchair spaces and aisle seating for those with mobility needs are available upon request. Ample parking is available, with spaces reserved for the disabled closest to the theater. Headsets may be requested at the box office prior to the show. Accessible restrooms are located in the theater lobby. For more information visit ps21chatham.org
Directions
PS21 is located at 2980 New York Route 66, in Chatham, New York. Driving time from Manhattan is approximately 2-2.5 hours. Free parking is available. If taking Amtrak, PS21 is 15 miles from the Hudson station. Transportation to and from the train stations are available through uber, and local taxi companies Northern cab (518-828-4222), H Transport LLC, (518) 577-5388, htransportllc.com, and McCanns Taxi (518-610-0071). Plus, on September 3 a charter mini bus, a round trip from Lincoln Center to PS21.
High-resolution Press Images for ANIMA can be found here.
MEDIA CONTACT: Margaret Doyle
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+1 646-515-1272