Jardin sous l'eau

Jardin sous l’eau (Underwater Garden) is a short solo choreographed and performed by Enora Gemin on the eponymous composition by Christian Zanési.

The work explores the figure of the mermaid as a body that exists between worlds, resisting fixed definitions of identity and belonging. Across cultures and histories, she appears in shifting forms: a celestial being—half bird, half woman—in Greek mythology, or a creature of the deep—half fish, half woman—in Celtic legends. Neither fully human nor entirely other, she inhabits a liminal space where belonging is constantly negotiated.

For Enora, the mermaid's perpetual exclusion from the human world echoes the historical exclusion of women from social, political and economic life. Yet the mermaid also embodies something more complex: a body carrying layers of cultural memory. Over centuries, her image has absorbed patriarchal fears, desires and projections surrounding feminine autonomy. Existing somewhere between reality and imagination, she has often been denied an existence of her own, becoming instead the object of stories told through the male gaze.

Long before her domestication by popular culture, the mermaid was a powerful and unsettling figure. Contemporary representations, particularly through Disney, have softened and sanitized her into an idealized model of femininity, stripping away her ambiguity and agency. Jardin sous l’eau seeks to reclaim the mermaid's mythological complexity, restoring her as a figure of resistance rather than fantasy.

The choreographic language unfolds in close dialogue with Christian Zanési's composition. Built from concrete sound sources, the music constructs an imagined underwater landscape that gradually becomes a physical environment inhabited by the performer. As sound transforms into space, the body becomes inseparable from its surroundings, inviting the audience into a world where the boundaries between the real and the imagined continuously dissolve.

Partial nudity is employed not as spectacle but as an act of reclaiming the body from imposed definitions. As Christian Zanési's soundscape, the choreography and the lighting gradually merge into a single living environment, the performer ceases to stand apart from her surroundings and instead becomes part of them. In this sense, the mermaid becomes a body that belongs precisely because it inhabits multiple identities simultaneously—human and more-than-human, myth and reality, body and landscape. Rather than seeking acceptance through fixed social norms, Jardin sous l'eau imagines belonging as a state of coexistence, where identity emerges through relationship with the living world.