J. A. / N + N / LA LOUISIANE - Forwards & Backwards

Hôtel La Louisiane
60 rue de Seine
75006 Paris

Jerome Andrews in the La Louisiane hotel
In the long list of artists who have chosen the Hôtel La Louisiane as their Parisian haven, from Miles Davis to Keith Haring, including Nam June Paik, there was no dancer. Jerome Andrews resided there from 1984 to 1992.
This exhibition revives his memory in one of the hotel rooms.
It presents the film Forwards and Backwards, shot in Hôtel La Louisiane, which traces his words as a dancer, his philosophy of life and his science of movement.
This memory is embodied in photographs taken on the spot during filming in May 1992.

Forwards and Backwards
Filmed a few months before his death, this interview with the American dancer, choreographer and teacher Jerome Andrews (1908-1992) was produced by the duettists N+N Corsino, who are best known for their activities as dancer-videographers. A portrait of beautiful simplicity, illustrated by neither photos nor extracts from shows. A few sentences are sometimes interspersed between the images, including this one at the opening: “It is the mind that makes the form. The place of dance is in movement, whether it is right or wrong.” Jerome Andrews’ vocation as a dancer appeared to him in a dream at the age of 12. “The ecstasy of the animal,” is how he defines this experience. Three years later, he obtained a scholarship to enter the Cornish School of Dance in Seattle. At 17, he danced with Ruth Saint-Denis, then with Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey. Later, he encountered German expressionist dance and worked with Kurt Joos, then Mary Wigman, whom he deeply admired. Finally, he settled in France in the 1950s and danced with Olga Stein, Karin Waehner, Jacqueline Robinson, and the Dupuys. A life full of movement.
Fabienne Arvers, in the catalogue of the National Cinema Center

production: Danse 34, Productions, Les Films du Tambour de Soie, Nice Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art
with the support of the SACD and the French Ministry of Culture (DGCA)

Hôtel La Louisiane
Opened in 1823 by a colonel of the Napoleon Bonaparte’s cuirassiers heavy cavalry, it served as a refuge for his brothers in arms, survivors of the Emperor's battlefields.
It is a stone muse, which has gradually become Paris’s answer to New York’s Chelsea Hotel, where artists come to find inspiration. It is a haven where, between reality and legend, the imagination of travellers is more unbridled than elsewhere.
At the time of the Liberation, the hotel was the meeting place for American jazz musicians (Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bud Powell, Charlie Parker, etc.), who only left it to play in the surrounding jazz cellars. In the 1970s, it became the headquarters of the Doors and Pink Floyd. La Louisiane was also a haven of peace for intellectuals. They were safe and warm together there, as a family. * Over the years, and still today, many writers have stayed there, immersed in words and excess*. There were legendary stays by Sartre (who was evicted in 1946 by the hotel’s lady boss, who didn’t like the way he paraded his amorous female conquests there), but also people such as Albert Cossery (the longest occupant), Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller, Simone de Beauvoir, and Douglas Kennedy.
Since the 1950s, many filmmakers have also followed one another there: Louis Malle, Bertrand Tavernier (who made the hotel the setting for Around Midnight), Barbet Schroeder (who filmed More there), Quentin Tarantino (who wandered through the psychedelic corridors *, script in hand), Leos Carax, Jane Campion and so on… as well as numerous contemporary artists such as Alberto Giacometti, Salvador Dalí, Bernard Buffet, Lucian Freud, and Cy Twombly.
In Télérama, Thierry Voisin, May 2023: *Le Refuge des étoiles, by Charlotte Saliou, published by Blacklephant Éditions.