Gareth Taylor

It is probably the strangest residency I have ever been part of — or the most honest.

Strange, because it escapes everything we usually picture.
No clearly defined project, no production, no deliverable.
Nothing to reassure an academic or institutional reading.

And yet, it’s all there.

For a week, Gareth and I talked.
A lot.
Five or six hours a day, sometimes more.

We talked about everything — and above all about the things that don’t easily fit on paper.
Studios, yes, but not just as places: as living spaces. The ceiling height, the markings on the floor, the inside, the outside.
The teams. The roles. Who watches, who decides, who organises, who carries out.
Where the actor stands in all this.
Where he stands.

He told me about his path, his relationship to the body, his past as a gymnast.
And then something became clear: for him, this craft doesn’t rest on technique alone, but on awareness. A fine attentiveness to what the body can do, to what it says, and to what it has to absorb, too.

And me, sitting across from him, I realised I had come looking for answers…
and that I was leaving, above all, with my bearings shifted.

Because that week knocked down quite a few ideas I had built up for myself.
Often without my noticing, through a rather absurd kind of comparison — like the frog in La Fontaine’s fable, puffing itself up to be as big as the ox.

And Gareth, without ever saying so outright, put me back in a truer place.

Not a smaller one.
A truer one.

Not the place of what I don’t have.
But the place of what I do with what I have.

And that changes everything.

So yes, we also got out and about.
We crossed Martinique, met people, shared moments.
But deep down, what really mattered happened elsewhere.

In the talking.
In the listening.
In that rather rare space where two people take the time to set down their experiences, their doubts, their ways of seeing the world.

A kind of residency that produces no object, but transforms.

At the end, he used a phrase: “we did bond.”
I keep turning that word over, wondering what it really holds.
A tie? Something welded together? Moving as one body, perhaps.

But that’s exactly it.

Something was created.
Something simple, solid, human.

And within that bond, a broader question began to take shape:
how do you help a territory grow by bringing it into contact with paths that come from elsewhere, without ever trying to imitate them, but by letting them resonate?

He left late, as is often the way.
And just before, two moments.

A presentation of this approach, of what we do here with motion capture — between creation, research and health — made possible thanks to Axel Artheron.

Then, almost like a wink, as we got to the airport: Noor-Sharina arriving, Gareth leaving.

A handover.
Almost choreographed.

A residency ending at exactly the moment another one begins.

Thank you, Gareth Taylor, for that.
For the generosity, the precision, the listening.
And that way of sharing without ever holding back.