Mystery of Gratuitousness
What is this prayer rising towards the stars ? What is this song projected like an offering to the listening expanse? Who is this dancer, dancing like royalty, who doesn’t give a damn? His being manifests without a reason, whispers the Rose of Silesius.
This secret, woven through prayer and singing is the embodiment of Beauty. An instant free of any expectation, the body-mind opens up, words fade, the insignificant vanishes. Reality stripped of all boundaries, silence reigns therein. Between the deepest depths and the greatest heights, our awareness expands and our soul contemplates.
Thibaut Garçon
The dignity of the dancer
By means of Afro-Haitian songs and yanvalou, Maud Robart guides the person into a direct, holistic and profound experience. She teaches in such a way that neither dances nor songs are objectified or depersonalized in the sense of being separated from the acting subject. Conversely, when they are regarded from the angle of their outward appearance or captured only on the mental plane, these objectified elements need a rational or technical explanation in order to be practiced.
According to their original nature, the songs and yanvalou are discovered every time, with surprise, coiled up in the depths of the human being as vehicles of living processes. This phenomenon unites and transcends individuals, times, and cultures. Traversing these levels of experience requires an inner attitude from the practitioner, which consists in becoming the channel wherein these processes can freely flow. Such processes transmute songs and dances into living entities endowing them with ineffable qualities. In this situation, the doer draws up the impetus to enter into relationship with these energies, in a game that is both risky and exciting. Beyond their perceptible and repetitive structures -codified precisely to arouse and contain them- these liberating entities radiate messages with a thousand meanings that are sensitive information constantly renewed, coming directly from their source: the human heart. It is an achievement for which Maud Robart's teaching predisposes the artist. This praxis focuses on palpable and somatic actions that require attention to detail, lucidity and sharpened sensoriality.
The Yanvalou dance, by its stirring simplicity, reveals the intrinsic nobility of the dancer. A silent undulation spreads along his spine awakened by the smooth cadence of his feet on the ground,and the delicacy of their touch resembles a caress, the beginning of a kiss: a movement in which the fusion of the hearts of the dancer and the earth is manifested by tender palpitations ... Full of life, the body is a thousand flames. In this ecstasy the eyes of the soul open with the intuition that everything participates in this mystery. The dance also reveals that the new horizon of consciousness, emanating from it, is not the multitude of things but the relationships among them. The concomitance of the cosmos is expressed through the body; the intimacy of the dancing being reconnects with the fullness of the world, and his ego is no longer a stray orphan but an individuality dressed in his original dignity.
Pablo Jimenez
*In Maud Robart’s research, movements and songs are practiced without musical instruments.
The creative power of small things
One might think a residential workshop with Maud Robart is just an opportunity to approach ritual afro-haitian voodoo songs.
What a surprise when, during my first workshop with her, I entered the empty workspace! Only limpidity and silence lived there. And the small lavender bouquet on the window seemed so right, with its purpose of warding off the flies!
An atelier in immersion with Mme Robart is a complex experience, in which the extraordinary of songs blends with the ordinary of daily life. Here the smallest things have a certain solemnity: cleaning, eating, dreaming, listening to the birds …
Carrying out these small nothings with awareness clarifies the objectives and the ethics of this research, and in every moment it claims the participant’s entire presence. Then, the consistency, grace and density of this approach unveils.
The objective circumstances, when freely accepted, nourish each person’s interior attitude, enabling Life to flow.
Cristina Baruffi
Poems
Flame
Flame so sweet and yet so lively.
Flame so peaceful and yet so wrathful.
Flame so beautiful and yet so harmful.
All of Mother Nature is made of opposites,
So, to follow life is to be torn in two
_________________________
Nothing
I yearn for nothing
I want nothing
I am nothing
Therefore, in the whole
I am nothing, at all
All, because of Nothing
And Nothing because of All
Nothing, is good for All
The infinite of All appears then
Because of Nothing
Therefore,
I am nothing.
Thibaut Garçon
And, in the same mouvement, emptiness revives the need in us to be in our original home - our body - engaging heart and soul as a global act.
Towards Ourselves
An ancient song, reminder of the ancestors, resounded in space. They became so close, these ancestors, it just took the time of a workshop! With generosity, thanks to Maud Robart’s research, a silence-song unraveled, ripe with teachings, just like a tale we always needed to hear. And in the long stream of a litany, our wandering spirits fall silent. Caught in the surge of a spontaneous dance the subtle euphoria of our senses, revealing hidden desire for freedom.
For those who fell out of touch with the rhythm in their life, the wildly essential beauty of these songs is an antidote against the harmful aspects of our society, caught in the race-forward of a flowing modernity.
Born in the West, I am the daughter of a country in a precarious balance between tradition and treason, law and inequality, real utopia and normative realism; as I inherit a so very opaque future, I realize that renouncing our dreams, our inner mystery and the trust in who we are, we risk concealing our biological and transcultural heritage, which precedes us, makes us who we are and brings us together.
Some quests lead us on a sane and sensible path. They are doors opening inwards, making us aware of questions about the meaning of life, art, relationships. Some quests exist since the beginning of times as well as in the dynamics of our present, just as it is.
Cristina Baruffi
What is Singing, and where can it take us?
If singing is calling, what are we calling? And why? If what we are calling goes by the name of God, the Divine, the Infinite, the Source, Life, the Sacred - that is not important. What is most important is the Playing. The whole - the call, ourselves calling and what is being called - arises interdependently. There’s no way of separating one from the other. Nevertheless, what we call God and each one of us calling, are not the same.
God is calling us. We are calling God.
We are singing God, God is singing us.
God is playing us, we are playing God.
The Singing-Calling springs and vanishes, it appears and disappears, it is done and undone – it is completely free, and equally absolutely necessary. God makes us. We make God. We cannot do otherwise. Buddhism calls these ways of playing the experience and understanding of the emptiness of all things. It is through playing in these ways that our realities manifest themselves: if we forget to play, we find ourselves enclosed in a flat, solid, tasteless world: enclosed in a unidimensional real-ness, separated from God, without any life.
However the act of singing becomes a reminder to Play, an instrument to talk to God. This is how Singing becomes a act of redemption, connecting us to God, and God to us. It’s like if God himself had the power to live through our Singing, giving us life. A world gets in alignment, and starts dancing.
Eva Kreikenbaum
Spontaneity
I always thought of spontaneity as an unstructured impulse, an uncontrolled movement of energy that happens without us being truly aware of it. However, my experience of spontaneity in this work has been quite different: the most organized form that my body has ever known, while I stay, calmly present, observing.
Laura Casinelli
A Breath
These songs, hymns to life, are of the same nature as the breath that animates us. Just as the origin and destination of our breath are unknown, similarly, we do not know where these songs come from and where they return. We sense a source, yet its origin is a mystery. So, singing these hymns, offering what in us is both temporal and timeless, is to consent to being simply their humble servants.
Juri Barone