A walk à la Rousseau

A walk à la Rousseau emerged during the creation of the piece The Lock (fantasy figure wrongly attributed to Fragonard)which opens with a reconstruction of Fragonard's eponymous painting from the late 1770s. The piece leans more towards Sade's rhetoric, but it's Rousseau who guides this walking/writing workshop proposed by Alice Roland with Gaëlle Bourges.

What are our daydreams made of, those moments of "delicious intoxication" so dear to Jean-Jacques Rousseau? To answer this question, we'll follow in the footsteps of the author of Rousseau's Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, a passionate herbalist who saw writing as a walk, and found material for his writing in his walks.

Initially, during a one-hour walk punctuated by sensory experiences, each participant will be invited to wander through interior and exterior landscapes and contemplate nature (that which lies outside, created and invented by the human hand and eye; that which lies within, made up of the sensations and thoughts that walking engenders within us). The second stage will be devoted to writing: each participant will create the first page of a herbarium of personal impressions, based on what he or she has experienced during the walk - we'll be shaping the fruit of a collection of perceptions rather than plants.

Between the search for precision in description (like a botany of sensations) and abandonment to the "delicious intoxication" of reverie, the writing will develop in a "back-and-forth movement from detail to the whole and from the whole to the detail", the double movement evoked by art historian Daniel Arasse to explain the pleasure we experience when contemplating a landscape.