TABLEAU VIVANT: A WANDERING RETROSPECTIVE

Orphee Carbon Copy, Diamond Panaflex

By the miracle light beam at the foot of the golden hills of California, here Orpheus is both a Panaflex camera and Eurydice, both object and hero, image and forever technology.

A freeze frame from the gates to the underworld, to the world beyond the mirrors where images endlessly collide.

Orphee looks into the technicolour glass lens, deep into the mythical, black void behind it, where dreams are recorded and made real and captures himself and becomes immortal but also destroys himself irrevocably.

Immaculate heart forever pumping impossible blood and fleshtone 0’s and 1’s from an unknowable quarry into the inchoate, flexing territories.

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Anna Barham /// Winnie Cott /// The Hal an Tow /// Bruce McLean / Nice Style: The World’s First Pose Band/// Mistick Krewe of Comus /// The New Orleans Society for Tableau Vivant /// Pablo Picasso / Erik Satie / Léonide Massine ///Audrey Reynolds /// Tai Shani

Presented as part of Prospect 1.5 New Orleans

Tableau Vivant: A Wandering Retrospective presents a selection of historic tableaux vivants alongside specially conceived tableaux by Tai Shani (UK), Audrey Reynolds (UK), Winnie Cott (FR), Anna Barham (UK) and The New Orleans Society for Tableau Vivant.
The show takes place on a flat bed truck that will proceed slowly up Julia St., making stops between the river and St. Charles Avenue.
At each stop, a different tableau vivant will be performed.  The show will be repeated the following weekend in the St. Claude Arts District.
Tableau Vivant translates literally as “living picture”: a group or individual in a carefully arranged pose that is held for a period of time.  It frequently includes elaborate sets, costumes, props and sometimes music. Performed variously as a parlour game, carnival attraction, pageant, pedagogic tool or propaganda image, tableaux vivants usually illustrate popular mythologies, famous paintings, classical, archetypal or historic events, and are most often performed within the context of informal social gatherings.  They are a way of stepping into the role of an historic figure, enhancing self-image or manipulating public identity; of bringing to life significant scenes in a subjective context, or revisiting a snapshot of the past and re-committing it to memory.