EXPRESSION ET CONSTRUCTION DE SOI

Annales

• Annale : Le sujet porte sur la thématique « Expression et construction de soi »

   

  1^re partie - Synthèse

  Prenez connaissance de la thématique ci-dessus et du dossier composé des documents A, B et C et traitez en anglais la consigne suivante (500 mots environ) :

  Show how art enables people to tackle the question of identity (in its individual or collective form), and to build a positive creative future for themselves.

   

  2^e partie - Traduction

  Translate the following passage from Document B into French. L’usage du dictionnaire unilingue non encyclopédique est autorisé.

  So these are my superheroes, and my imaginary vindication¹. Our female ancestors fly across the ocean, invade the museums and take back our possessions. The women have blasted the doors of the museum open, thrown their cotton print dresses away, and reclaimed their traditional dresses. Every dress in the painting is a real dress in a museum collection. I felt much better after I finished. By painting this I took something back. I brought them home. (lignes 5-10)

  1 victory

   

  Document A - Still, We Dance: Why Alvin Ailey's Revelations Is More Vital Than Ever

  Sixty years after its debut, the company's signature dance remains an ode to the deliverance of self-expression in the face of adversity.

  Every year, in theaters and concert halls around the globe, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater takes audiences to church. Not just any house of worship, but the working-class, Black, Southern temples of rural Texas. The gospel they see and feel is Revelations, the company’s signature dance, which has been staged more often than the troupe’s other celebrated works, for some 25 million fans.

  This year Revelations turns 60, and it has lost none of its incantatory power. Against the backdrop of both a global pandemic that disproportionately ravages communities of color and the urgency of social justice movements including Black Lives Matter, Ailey’s valentine to the spirituals of his youth is its own call to action, an ode to the deliverance of self-expression in the face of adversity.

  “Ailey’s dance language is ecstatic and virtuosic, and his choreography has given generations of Black dancers a world of complex movement and emotion to inhabit,” says the critic Margo Jefferson. As a young woman Debbie Allen saw Revelations, and it was a watershed moment. “It was the permission I needed to throw away my pointe shoes and kick-ball-change to that which I could really express,” she tells T&C. Decades later Khalia Campbell, 27—who appears in this story alongside her Ailey colleagues Samantha Figgins, 31, and James Gilmer, 27—was also mesmerized.

  “There were people on the stage who looked like me,” Campbell recalls of the performances she saw as a student. “I was able to experience what my ancestors went through, and I was able to see it through movement.”

  That sense of history’s long arc is not just an element of Revelations, it is woven into the fabric of a company born out of the civil rights movement to offer hope, strength, and the balm of beauty. Ailey was 29 when he choreographed the piece, and he intended it as a tribute to an elder, his mother, and the music they listened to at Mount

  Olive Baptist Church during the Depression, and also to his spiritual forebears, the writers Langston Hughes and James Baldwin.[...]

  Ailey artistic director emerita Judith Jamison says they all brought something new to their roles, as will their successors, and in that, too, there is a message. “We have been and continue to be triumphant,” she says. “We have many more bridges to cross, and we will cross them.”

  Kibwe Chase-Marshall, TOWN&COUNTRY online, August 6, 2020

   

  Document B

  

  Gouache and watercolour on paper, 50 x 61.7 cm - Collection of the Saskatchewan Arts Board, Regina¹ - Sherry Farrell Racette, “Ancestral Women Taking Back Their Dresses”, 1990

  The first time I travelled to Europe to visit museum collections, I was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of cultural material from across the globe. I was looking for “our stuff” and I found it. When I got back, the first thing people would ask was, "Did you bring them back?" [...] "The only way we're ever going to get that stuff back is if those women, the artists, just go there and get it." So these are my superheroes, and my imaginary vindication . Our female ancestors fly across the ocean, invade the museums and take back our possessions. The women have blasted the doors of the museum open, thrown their cotton print dresses away, and reclaimed their traditional dresses. Every dress in the painting is a real dress in a museum collection. I felt much better after I finished. By painting this I took something back. I brought them home.

  Sherry Farrell Racette

  1 the capital city of the Canadian province of Saskatchewan
  2 victory

   

  Document C - A Note From the Author

  Readers often assume that when a poet uses ‘I’ in a poem, then it must be about the poet himself or herself. Since I only became familiar with the expression ‘half-caste’ after moving to Britain, it is not meant to be autobiographical. But I wanted to give a voice to ‘half-caste’, and through a series of absurd images point to the absurdity of perceiving a human being in terms of ‘halves’. So when Tchaikovsky, for instance, mixes a black key with a white key, is the result a half-caste symphony? When light and shadow mix in the sky, is the result a half-caste weather?

  Behind the poem lies the harsh lesson of history that the obsession with purity can lead to genocide. The satirical tone of the poem, you can put down to my inspiration from calypso, a powerful Caribbean musical genre in which mischievous lyrics take on serious issues.

  I hope you enjoy the collection and grow up not to ‘half’ a future, but to a full life enriched by the wonder of human diversity. Remember, poetry can be your ally along the way.

  John Agard, half-caste, 2004

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