Body, Consciousness, Cosmos

What are the links between body, consciousness and cosmos? Or, to put it another way, what are the body, consciousness and the cosmos?... Over the course of an afternoon, Vânia Vaneau investigated, through practice and theory, what these terms invite us to explore and question, through the prism of three different fields: Zen, physics and dance.

Based on her artistic research through dance, Vânia Vaneau invites Zen monk Christophe Desmur and physics and mathematics researcher Laurent Chevillard to share their practices and points of view on these themes. The idea was to bring together different fields of knowledge to explore and enrich the issue, and find points of complementarity as well as opposition. To this end, the afternoon was divided in four parts.

The public was invited to take part.

/ Initiation to Zazen by Chistophe Desmur :

Christophe talks about his zen practice through zazen. What is zazen? Zazen is the secret of Zen. It's sitting meditation in the traditional lotus posture, practiced by human beings since prehistoric times. Zazen is not a theory, an idea or a piece of knowledge to be grasped by the brain. It's a practice that radically changes our own mind. It means merging with the whole universe. In 1967, Master Taisen Deshimaru, disciple and successor of the great master Kodo Sawaki, brought the practice of zazen to Europe, planting “the original seed in new soil.”

/ Sharing scientific insights with Laurent Chevillard:

Laurent proposes a discussion articulated around the suggested themes, attempting to link these different notions with concepts drawn from physics research. This leads him to talk about matter, mainly inert matter, and intuition in science. And as for the cosmos, whose definition in physics seems clear, he tries to present it in an accessible way by evoking some important related notions, such as time, gravitation and finitude.

/ Body practice with Vânia Vaneau :

Drawing on her artistic research into different states of body and consciousness, the relationship between bodies and each other, and between bodies and materials in space and time, Vânia shares some physical practices related to inner and outer perception, from the infinitely small to the infinitely large.

/ Open discussion between participants and presenters:

A time of open sharing to ask questions, find answers together and, above all, build bridges between these different fields, which inform us in different ways about who we are and the world we live in.