Aug 26, 2006
Benoît Lachambre, Cie ParBleux
Délire Défait

"That’s important", he says. The audience is allowed to go out for peeing during the performance if they want. A shifting-smoking-junking man, sitting on a chair in front of a camera, and telling about documentaries : squeezed elephants, junkies in jail, small boxes in the head. There’s this violence spread in his body and words, which we receive filtered by the camera. It isn’t thrown at our face : it’s a kind of diagonal violence, reflected.

A stage on the stage, a subtitle of a speech of a real man doubled with a TV man and a painted man speaking fast, in transe, while the subtitles above him are gently articulating it. “ That’s just an image of me.”
Is there any falsification? Where’s the lie? (as a contemporary audience, that’s the secret question we always have...) Who should we look at/listen to? “Look at me!”he says to us through the TV. And indeed, we don’t know what or who we are looking at any more, if this man is a junkie or a TV speaker or Benoît or a seagull or a performer playing with the layers of realities. The layers of visions. The situation is as complex as a mathematic problem with lots of parenthesis and other enigmatic signs. In this delirium of reflexion and splitting identities, we watchers are likely to transform ourselves too and shift into multiplicity.


The seagulls. Suddenly the seagulls are jumping out of the TV (subtitle : AR; AR; AR, AR, AR, AR!), on the TV, this is Hitchcock in power...
This unique sound coming out of his body is bowling any dimension of space over, : he is this sound, we are this sound, the space is this sound, the obscurity, the density is this sound and at once it stops.
It’s the beginning of a playfull running through actions executed like goals, supported by a
multidirectional space (superposed designs of sport sets on the floor). There’s an “ici” and a “là”, with in between, a colourfull spatial nervous system.
Here, the body is the meeting point of all the possible uses in order to find a way of exit : being is smoking, playing music is hitting one’s head, dancing for someone is a matter of sexy show, thinking is splitting (“ Se fendre en 4 pour faire la part des choses.”)...

At the end : resistance.

« Benoît qu’est-ce que ça veut dire aboutir à la résistance ? »
« Benoît qu’est-ce que ça veut dire aboutir à la résistance ? »
Obsession
All the RE wrapped together with a REd tape : REfusing, REjecting, REsisting, REstricting…

But how can this all be done with such a quality of innocence and playfullness? There’s this strange balance shifting between deep violence and light delirium.

Défaire se défaire délirer délyrer déraper déranger décrocher dériver détourner décaler décrire


It becomes more and more complex when appears a woman, which seems to come directly out of the painting, as a visual phenomenon, a David Lynch’s effect, an apparition of Dorian Gray, or a manifestation of “das Unheimliche”. She reflects Benoît’s words like an echo, in a very godardian way : no additional sense, but just common sense, flux.
We’re witness of a simple relationship in which “yes” is the answer, and that leads to a game of exchanging....clothes.

The final “icon” : Benoît in a dress hanging on his self-portrait, the string under his throat. The painting-woman has put him in this stuck place where he’s threatened to being drawn into immobility. And silence. Resigning to this position of submission, he just moves slightly his head to thank the applause. And each time, the pressure of the string on his throat. We spectators wonder if we should keep on applausing or not ...as paradoxally we contribute to the supplice of this junkie-Christ in leopard fancy dress... and feel like a perverse witness of a should-we-laugh-or-not situation.
But humour seems to undo all this violence, at the end, and
going out of the theater we have the impression that the show is going on without us, we’d like to go back there and see if he’s still smoking hanging on his painting, we’d like to stay and see what would come out of this final human installation...
And somehow, we feel this performance undid something deep in our way of perceiving...



Lucie Eidenbenz

Aug 15, 2006
DD Dorvillier
No Change or Freedom is a psycho-kinetic skill

no beginning
walls floor windows
open window

sound of outside

microphones
microphones lying
microphones standing hanging

DD

lying
two bodies lying
nothing
time being

DD

moving through
walls floor windows microphones clothes
bucket

all equals all

nothing
drawing space without drawing
by thinking

touching wall meeting microphone touching sweater kicking bucket
without doing
nothing

all equal

in the moment of appearing
disappearing

sound of actions

through microphone s
one body lying
nothing
body lying there
on top of microphone

sound of action

DD

naked
almost out of the window
almost

actions in meeting objects
wall floor windows microphones clothes bucket
appearing disappearing in the same moment

nothing

continuously happening while moving through changing space
changed nothing
everything

piano playing

man
moving past
no one moved

everything

man playing piano
girl lying moving drawing

DD appearing disappearing
while constantly being

light changing by own action
choice


DD

girl moving
in white dress

dresses changing
different colors

all the same

big shadow on the wall for a little while
no time

everything

in the beginning without the beginning moving related to outside
towards the end without end dancing of the inside
liver

music there somewhere
here

no end


Me and No Change or Freedom is a psycho-kinetic skill by DD Dorvillier


I want to cross my fingers the opposite way
I want to go to the supermarket on all four, buy my food and carry it home on my back on all four
I want to fill the whole kitchen floor full of green apples with flags on top in the morning for my friends to find when they enter to eat breakfast
I want to brush my teeth in a different place
When I drink coffee I want to put the cup upside down on the table.

I can do it


The most important piece I have seen in a long time; political, liberating and untraceable though to be traced and



by Mia Habib

Aug 13, 2006
Marco Berretini, Melk Prod
No Paraderan


Well, I just would like to have a good time on stage
Many of my friends will tell you
So if we entertain you with magic cities
Be simply happy

Well I’d just like to have to have a good time in the parkett
Beautiful Antonio sitting next to me too
So if you entertain us with simply cities
Magic it will be

It is so nice to be tonight (in Vegas with you)
It is so nice to be tonight (in Vegas with you)

I see many rushing up for money
I see many rushing up for bodies
I see many rushing up for TV
I see many rushing up for honey

no worry babe
show will go on

I saw an artist clapping her own pretty rythms with dead-fish eyes
I saw an artist trying too hard to have fans
I saw an artist wanting the revolution being televised
I saw an artist shouting « silence is sexy »
I saw an artist trying to hard to have sex
I saw an artist trying to hard to avoid having sex
I saw an artist dying on stage like in a David Lynch movie

Is it me ?
Am I pretending ?
Am I self-determined ?

Do not worry babe
Take it easy
Show might go on




marianne

Aug 13, 2006
Barbara Kraus
Fuck All That Shit



Marko Milic
Fuck All That Shit

written with golden letters:
cant it go beyond the skin?


I read one interview and Marina Abramovic was saying how many art exist in the world today, so she past a question What art really makes a difference?
With a notion that so many performances happening in the world, and so many artists working and presenting what they are doing,  what pieces really make sense and is there valuation simply matter of time/space, circumstances & personal?


Ladies and Gentlemen welcome to Fuck All That Shit. I think it is a moment or feeling we all share. Moment we're sick of it all. Something is definitely wrong.
Nothing will hurt, everything will be very very fun.
It is about education, excitement, sadness...

You didn't have a ticket because you spent all your pocket money on a short guide to comparative religions. So you waited in front of UREX tunnel. There were stoned girls with a blue wigs & people covered with lubricant who crawl on top of each other.
Iggy was there. He ask us for tickets.
- I will let you in but you do something spectacular to fuck my pain away.
So He brought ticketless people on stage and scream on us to dance or do something. I couldn't do anything, he screamed a lot. He ask the audience: Should they stay? Audience didn't know whats happening, they just try to figure it out and manage the situation of them being there. I went off the stage. I tried to avoid the crowd. Spectators and performers together were pretty much motionless so it was hard to get through.  All sorts of creatures in costumes try to interact just by being who they are - just by being who they supposed to be. Costume increase the level of fun fun but what makes people join together in one event like this.

In the toilet the main subject of the performance for me became Pleasure. In there was a beautiful tall woman sitting on a chair like baba sera but more glamorous. She had a lot of make-up. After a while she told me she is actually a man & showed me his hairy chest. He was such a harbor after all the things that happened to me on F.A.T.S. We had a beautiful talk with a glass of wine & other men pissing around. I enjoyed my new friend's company a lot and I decided to make an interview with him for my review:

To give pleasure is the easiest thing on Earth!, he said & in the toilet it really had sense.
Next day, I went again on a performance (with a ticket). I wanted to be interactive this time. I find out that audience can also take a masks or roles in a form of "virus" & be more precise in witch way they could interact (One guy gave me a rubble ball witch means that I could be frolic & good behave in the same time, another one gets something(?) that means he could hug people and say he love them, so there was many options )

I went straight to the toilet but there was just an empty chair with a cd player on it with some light music on. I sat there for a while.
Than some blond wig man came and I knew he was a man first second I saw his face, but he couldn't match with pleasure queen who was so witty when she told me:
Most of the people don't like to talk about it - that they need to go to the toilet.
Hail the new puritans &
Can we really fuck ALL that shit.

I looked at the card he gave me day before. It was one fortune telling card that I picked.
Andenken zum Besuch bei der Pleasure Queen
PLEASURE WILL BE
TRUTH

Then I went to the women's toilet where the other pleasure queen was. She danced for visitors, massage them & give them fruits.
Later I went in theater space and I saw the end of F.A.T.S.  All performers gathered on stage and scream. 
In a women's toilet I saw a text on the wall written with the same golden letters:
COULDN'T WE FLY WITH ALL THE OTHER CREATURES THROUGH THE UNIVERSE?
The girl who works behind the scenes said that
- Its a lot of work cause there is so many people who need to be dressed. There all nice. So many different characters.


                                                                                          

Aug 13, 2006
Marco Berretini, Melk Prod
No Paraderan

The curtain is red. The trolley is white. The girls are both blond and wear respectively a pink and black gliterring dress. The drinks are a caleidoscope, a cocktail, a poison, a pause, a toast, a hole, a distraction, a challenge, a dependance, a tension, an every day habit, a lot of fun, an addiction, a necessity,a reality, an element.

We accept the fact that this element is going to alcoholize every single set moment of attempt to produce show and we love it, we’re intrigued by it because the show will intermintently be jumping from depression to joyous entertainment right in our faces. We’re tremendously fascinated by the troupe of yellow smiles that this artist offers us tonight. We enjoy the ballet dances, the animal deviations, the strategies of seduction, the choreographer as the maestro, the speeches, the hilarious smoking deaths, the references to TV Shows, Hollywood, Stranvinsky,The Daltons, The Marx Brothers,Les Ballets Russes, his own doubts, wishes, dreams and his appropriation of superficial and mundane yet scary sense of reality. We laugh of his incredible obsession with details and we acknowledge his boredom with the reality of all our swallowed clichés.

I watch this twice and I can’t help thinking of John Cassevetes’ “The Opening Night” where tremendously fantastic Gena Rowlands struggles to find a sense to go on and to keep her character as real as real as real as real as real as real... She falls, she trembles, she laughs, she forgets the lines, she goes into improv, she shines, she dries up my throat and makes me want to drink to be able to face the reality of the stage. Still she manages to keep up the show! Drunk Strasberg for Actors? Or just the best medicine fo stage fright prevention?

In the second performance at the Impulstanz Festival, the audience is not cooperative at all, Sorry, they’re the most cooperative of all performances I have eaten at this dance supermarket as for once half of the people leave the theater(and I LOVE IT!), expressing indignity and escaping the habitual politeness of the 3 to 4 rounds of applauses even if hating the offers of the artists. The weight is felt on stage, as the performers seem to drink doubly of what they drank in the previous night and the show evolves slower and gets substantialy more complex than the joyous fun of jokes and tricks of the other show.
Berretini’s Alcohol for dancers is a a strategy to confuse our feelings and lead us freely in the rollercoaster of humor, hysteria and delicious excitement of voyerism and great great desire of empathy with the players.

This is a theater of “No Spectaccolo”, “No Contemporary Dance”, “no Speakeran” and “No Paraderan”. Vituosity is disguised as an evening in a bar around the corner with an agreeable amount of good disposition, imitation of our favourite songs, piruettes, peanuts, so much playfullness and endless loneliness as a sign of a possible contemporary definition of collective.

At times it is old fashioned and lost in the strategies of Vaudeville, great! or weren’t they all trying to work out their asses out to do their best in their own alcoholized ways. We are testimonials of their efforts: we go back in our chairs whilst laughing harder and harder. We go forward on our chairs as our head is triggered by so simple- complex acts of production of meaning while the RED curtain went back and we didn’t even notice.Slowly,they took over the space of the theater of our projections but still they never kill the “legendary” question “What’s behind the curtain”? leaving us space for our own low, cheap, bitchy and bohemian imagination and for our own construction of the performance.
Hooray for Berretinni as the ITALIAN master maestro of little dances and doubtful returns, the man in the role of Santiago (Banderas meets Bardem meets ITALIA(n) Charms and easiness), Charaire (super-duper ballerina, femme fatale des cigarettes et MOET, bitchy gaze and a face for the movies!), the man of the peanuts( beautiful 5/10 minutes of stillness after such brilliant GA-GA speech) and the rest of the team supporting each other, killing one another, fucking one another and exposing themselves and the others a little bit more moment after moment. You had fun and so did I. It was simultaneously as good and hard for you as it was for me (whatever this means!). I will go back to the theater to really figure out who the heck is THIS ARTIST!

António Pedro Lopes

Aug 13, 2006
Jonathan Burrows & Matteo Fargion
The Quiet Dance

Seeing a performance and writing about it weeks after is a test: for the writer and for the performance. The things that were clear and strong in the performance and in the experiencing of it become even more so, and the things that made no greater impact on you will have faded out of your memory.

It might also be, that letting a lot of time pass between you and the performance, you end up writing more about yourself than about what you saw. Which is a valuable starting point since the performance will ultimately happen in you; you do not have a first-hand access to anyone else´s experience.

The Quiet Dance did back then and still keeps on communicating strongly to me. I can go back to the feeling of generosity that was surrounding me in the Schauspielhaus - The Quiet Dance being the sunny afternoon in the park, the shared every-day life of two charming middle-aged men, filled with gentle humor and friendly intelligence.

The Quiet Dance was a warm opening into the world, where one-to-one communication carries a great value and where time is not being measured by the achievements of Doing, instead by the comfortability of Being. Jonathan Burrows and Matteo Fargion presented on the stage a relationship full of possibilities and subtle variations - a relationship very intimate, yet inviting.

Rarely have I seen the act of communication on the stage so genuine, so real, so warm, so unique.

I embraced the performance and will try to take it with me, where ever I go.



LEENA TOLONEN

Aug 13, 2006
Salva Sanchis & Bruno Vansina Trio (E/B)
"DOUBLE TRIO LIVE VIENNA I, II AND III"

"Visible Vioces"

In Progy & Bess: It was very nice just sitting comfortable around tables, drinking and watching what is happening on the small stage.

3 musician were playing really good jazz music and the 3 dancers were following the music.
That was a kind of IMROVISATION MEETING.

The every short episodes were simple, pure and fine.

The dancers swam in the music, their bodies were transformed into living instruments.

The movements were lovely-wonderful-amazing.

I was abolutely happy because I have seen finally nice contamporary dance on the stage.

I didn´t have to concentrate on the meaning of the piece, what the coreographer wants to say with the unnesessarry subjects, scene, costüms und a lot of blablabla... (Because usually that was my problem with the shows in Vienna. Why and what???)

The show didn´t want to be more than what was.

It was like a "Screen-saver-program".

In the last part of performance the movements got exhausted, become to one sided and flat. I was waiting for more energie, more freedom in the moving without so much controll. Sometimes the music was more stronger than the dance.

But: I can say I liked the show.



Csilla Nagy, Hungary

Aug 13, 2006
Salva Sanchis & Bruno Vansina Trio (E/B)
"DOUBLE TRIO LIVE VIENNA I, II AND III"

"Visible Vioces"

In Progy & Bess: It was very nice just sitting comfortable around tables, drinking and watching what is happening on the small stage.

3 musician were playing really good jazz music and the 3 dancers were following the music.
That was a kind of IMROVISATION MEETING.

The every short episodes were simple, pure and fine.

The dancers swam in the music, their bodies were transformed into living instruments.

The movements were lovely-wonderful-amazing.

I was abolutely happy because I have seen finally nice contamporary dance on the stage.

I didn´t have to concentrate on the meaning of the piece, what the coreographer wants to say with the unnesessarry subjects, scene, costüms und a lot of blablabla... (Because usually that was my problem with the shows in Vienna. Why and what???)

The show didn´t want to be more than what was.

It was like a "Screen-saver-program".

In the last part of performance the movements got exhausted, become to one sided and flat. I was waiting for more energie, more freedom in the moving without so much controll. Sometimes the music was more stronger than the dance.

But: I can say I liked the show.



Csilla Nagy, Hungary

Aug 13, 2006
Salva Sanchis & Bruno Vansina Trio (E/B)
"DOUBLE TRIO LIVE VIENNA I, II AND III"

"Visible Vioces"

In Progy & Bess: It was very nice just sitting comfortable around tables, drinking and watching what is happening on the small stage.

3 musician were playing really good jazz music and the 3 dancers were following the music.
That was a kind of IMROVISATION MEETING.

The every short episodes were simple, pure and fine.

The dancers swam in the music, their bodies were transformed into living instruments.

The movements were lovely-wonderful-amazing.

I was abolutely happy because I have seen finally nice contamporary dance on the stage.

I didn´t have to concentrate on the meaning of the piece, what the coreographer wants to say with the unnesessarry subjects, scene, costüms und a lot of blablabla... (Because usually that was my problem with the shows in Vienna. Why and what???)

The show didn´t want to be more than what was.

It was like a "Screen-saver-program".

In the last part of performance the movements got exhausted, become to one sided and flat. I was waiting for more energie, more freedom in the moving without so much controll. Sometimes the music was more stronger than the dance.

But: I can say I liked the show.



Csilla Nagy, Hungary

Aug 13, 2006
chris haring/Liquid Loft
running sushi

Ah, the joy of being flat.

“Running Sushi” begins with a choice. The audience chooses the sushi, and the order of the piece is made. We all have cards which represent the scenes they will perform. On the front of the card is a word, on the back a picture. Once the order of the scenes is decided, they begin.

Already the abondon of a fixed order makes me wonder—are they all of equal importance, or is the importance irrelevant? Actually, it gets better---the dramaturgy “a la carte” which we got was simply a navigation through these events.

Each event is a scene, with either the man or woman or both. All sounds and texts are playback, and they attach the sounds to either a movement or gesture, or synchronize with the lips. Pretty standard idea.

Then I realize I am experiencing the perfect picture of Gilles Delueze’s Plan du Eminance. This is the idea that all events are on a flat surface. Think of the piece as a city—wherever you decide to go on your little walk doesn’t arrange the city in a different way, it arranges your experience of the city on that day. Imagine not only in space, but with time. Forget about the construction of a space where “this comes before that because of this”. No linear or hierarchal difference should be placed on them, They are rearrangable.

Which brings us to causality. Can rearranged events redefine your understanding of them? Can the same event redefine itself because the context is shifted, or more information added, or taken away.

BUT, what happens is the simple and exquisite principle of phenomenology: Links are made, by the order which we are experiencing them. We know this is a “replacable” association, but we cannot help but to experience it. One event to the other is as “deep” as the sounds that are bouncing off the performers body.

So we must abondon the idea of depth. The idea of story. The followable narrative. Does that mean it is abstract? Absolutely not. Every gesture shows the mechanism of perception. As easy as the sound and movement fit together (thanks to a virtuosic hour of painstaking precision), we are clearly shown how easy we can accept, postpone and rearrange. Amazing how profound a lack of depth can be.

So I begin to decipher the cartoon picture/words, trying to associate them to their correct scene. I have the cards so I begin to ask, “which scene is this”. Now if I interptet the word, I begin to look for an understanding of the events associated to the word. However the pictures are full of the 1000 words my mind is giving me, taking me to another place. So I make possibilities. I search for links (manga means sensual and cartoon, but the picture is a couple holding chospsticks, so I always doubt my choice.) Or I make parrallel associations, using a pictoral interpretation and a verbal one. In the end it is all just that—my interpretation, my association boucing of this couple, arranging things as I want to see them, as it makes better sense for me.

I was half correct with my choices, but that was of no consequence. We are in the matrix of projection and interpretation. So the sounds bounce of their bodies, and I grab them as I want.

How often we come to an event and see something all figured out. The order, the meaning, the through-line. Here the peformers were simple slaves to the sounds, and I was free to navigate wherever I wanted. The only must was the need for the performer to be “on the music”.

And what music! The body as a sound board. The grotesque gets nuetralized since it is playback. It’s all fake. Just believe it and enjoy.

a big thank you to steph and johnny

domenico giustino

Aug 13, 2006
Benoit Lachambre / par b.l.eux
Délire Défait




Benoit´s solo “Délire Défait” was not a performance made up in front of me, but a shared experience. There was no beginning, but an entering into a space, which had the graspable texture of a landscape, indicating the intensity and complexity of travelling to places and edges of a self portrait. Benoit, moving on stage, smoking cigarettes as if eating, in a state of delirium, waiting for us, knowing the way to where he will take us with him.

Now, more than one week after entering “Délire Défait”, I really feel I have been travelling and I have lived something. It keeps on touching, reflecting and changing me.

Undone delirium shows and validates the delirium of searching for an image of oneself and the impossibility of holding on to one. It recognises shifts and transformations as what we are. By moving through different layers and intensities, diving into memory-fragments of a personal history, crossing the edges of what he perceives, what he is and what he is perceived as, Benoit stretches the container of what I think is the reality of a self-portrait.

A stage on the stage, where he sits on a chair in front of a camera, the TV besides him showing his face and the portrait, painted by a friend 26 years ago, hanging behind him:

That´s me.
That´s an image of me.
That´s not me.
That was me 26 years ago.
I am a documentary junkie.
I am what I see on TV.
I am that fucking asshole sitting in front of the TV doing nothing.
Telling lies.
A documentary of an ex-junkie in jail.
A documentary of a tap dancing contest in Northern Ireland.
A baby dying in somebody´s arms in Ethopia.
Beautiful nature programs. Crows.
We´re all in jail.
We put what we see into little boxes.
We put these boxes in our brains, accumulate and eventually we do something with it.
I am a tap dancing girl, dancing on little boxes.

He transforms into a crow, into the tap-dancing girl, into a porno macho man, into a seagull flying beyond the container…
Reaching another edge to get wrapped up with while removing it: until he finally stands on his head, wrapped up with the red-tape-edge around his face and his clothes around his legs.
He calls his friend Nadia to turn him around: “I feel a little bit off-center. Could you turn me around?”
He becomes the boy playing with the girl, telling stories and playing games like changing clothes and dancing behind her, while she can watch herself and him on the TV.
They change roles and Benoit sits again in front of the camera, in the girl´s dress, behind him the backside of the portrait hanging around his throat.
Benoit hanging inside his self-portrait, dissolved, again smoking cigarettes and telling us calmly that it is the end of the show …
”I have nothing more to say. Does anybody have some question?”

I don´t.
There is no ending, but a departing from “Délire Défait”.
It is very beautiful like this. Many of us stay and take time before leaving.
This was not a performance, I thought, it was real. It was a real performance.





Andrea Maurer

Aug 13, 2006
Jerome Bel
The Show must go on

One of the elements that are emphasized inside the work of Jerome Bel is the interaction of the public, utilizing the music as instrument of manipulation that permits us to experience a not conventional look of the theater.

We are part of...

This is stated with the absence of the artist in scene, creating ours own imaginary, connecting us with our own experiences.
But once we “let the sun shin” and the artists are in scene, we continue identifying and finding ourself on stage through these different people that react with symbolic movements according to the letters that the DJ, always present in scene, allow us to listen.

We can summarize the Jerome Bel performance as a simple game: “Simon say…”
Once the play is understood, the audience or participant, interfere with diverse and creative form ex: turning on lighters (such as a musical recital) dancing, shouting and laughing, elements that as well as the artists are part of the work.

But behind this simple and funny idea there is a great question that Jerome Bel permits us to make: who is the observer and who the observed?

Question that make us agree that still the show must go on!

Santiago Turenne
Montevideo, Uruguay

Aug 13, 2006
cie. maria hassabi
Still Smoking

After having seen this performance i went home very fast, took a shower, sat down and started writing. I had no clue how to approach writing about this piece.
It ended up as automatic writing. No wondering about how i would explain myself in the best way, just writing without lifting my pen from the paper.
Trying to be as uncensored and honest as i could be, as was adviced by a pro.

Here it is...

This review will be as confusing as a dancewebber can be.i decided to write a review on maria hassabi’s „still smoking“. Mainly because i never heard from this company, hardly knew anything about them, except that they are from NY (so is ann liv young, which doesnt say much about the hassabies) and that my former teacher Ori flomin is in it (which doesnt say much neither, classes and performances from or with the same person can be very different) who would have thought that i chose the one performance in the whole festival that would question my believes, aesthetical ideas and „labels“ about (contemporary) dance so much. i never saw a performance like this in my life.it doesnt really matter that people are telling me that this is typical american dance, 20 years behind european dance. fact is that at the moment i wonder about everything concerning styles. aesthetics, theatricality and even walking on stage. I disliked the piece. Or no, the lamps were great, i liked some of the costumes and the completely out-of-place weirdo dancer with the huge glasses was pretty funny. Besides that i could not appreciate the style whatsoever, the nudity, the kissing, slapping and whatever theatrical movements were completely unnecessary for me. some more about the walking... indeed... i didnt know till now that this kind of walking was possible to perform seriously. Big steps with the toes carressing the floor. To me it seemed when the performers had to go from place A to B, they had to make it look „dancy“ by lifting the legs, stupid jumps and so on. I got cramped and tensed just by looking at it. The most important thing that happened to me during this whole event is the question of how far does my dance-education and performance-watching influences/indoctrinates me? What is my taste? My personal taste? Do i hate these specific aesthetics so much because i am raised by a generation of dancers/teachers/performers that just casually walks from place A to B when on stage? Or is that what i like that what i like and nothing more? How would it be like to be an innocent dance-virgin again when watching a performance? Would it be possible to as well appreciate „typical american“ dance as „typical european“ dance? Those forms of dance cannot be defined like that at all, but it comes the closest to what i want to say. I know those questions are not popping up for the first time, probably most artists have been passing by this stage at least once. And so have i, but that it happens again now is exactly what i need. Instead of going to 24 performances in 4 weeks and just understanding or not understanding a piece, liking or disliking it,..., it triggered something in me that made me wonder about these questions again. But what the hell made her decide to make this piece? Use this scenery, these dancers, this music? I couldnt see anything in the piece which showed me the desire of doing something on stage. Did they just wanted to dance? Ok, fine by me, i actually can appreciate that. But i personally couldnt see any enjoyment in the dancers... i felt they were struggling so much. I really missed to see the dancers agree with the movements they were doing, I mainly saw them struggling with movements which were against their bodies, tensed movements, crampy necks and arms. What on earth was this about? Pfff, the more i write, the more i really wonder why this piece was made. Why this title, why this music? Aiaiai, i cannot understand and normally i dont care whether or not i understand a piece. Quite often you can see that a piece finds its own logic while the piece continues. And sure within movement i could see that happening, but i actually didnt give a shit. Cause i missed content... but why do i need content? And so on and so on. Aahh, i love vicious circles!

Lieve De Pourcq

Aug 13, 2006
LISA/Nicholas Floch
Structural Multifunctions

A performance, performing and decomposing social behaviour, audience functions and positions. 15 performers meet 15 viewers. In a one to one relationship, seated in circlewise arranged tables, conversations are started, evolved and ended by a sound which asks the performers to proceed in their networking from viewer to viewer according to a predetermined pathway/score. Encountered with strangers, your performer might dance for you, talk or discuss with you or simply look at you. Vodka is introduced, the smalltalk continues, everyone gets more talkative. Until your next performer suddenly announces you the end. Fantastically, most of the participants stayed seated and started an aftertalk or simply continued the talk from before.
What happens to viewers, when our attention span is prolongued, as your are trained by your cultural background to pay attention to utterances and keep conversations going. A framed and though fresh representation of networking at a social gettogether, an arbitrarily selected microsociety, you start talking, start liking your opposite, though you feel degraded, like an outsider at a party, incapable of moving and contributing to decisionmaking of who to talk to next. One realises what it means to fulfill your position as a lifelong educated viewer who sits still, listens and might fade away from time to time without anyone even noticing.
The will to invest mental or physical activity into a performance as a viewer can maybe still not be taken as a given. How to manipulate the audience in order to participate by uttering their usually unspoken immediate response to the proposed, without making your viewer feel you do so, but rather use our given urge to keep communications going, use our internalised social behaviour. If choreographing is the crossing out of contingency through the arrangement in time and space, by transcending the arbitrary (Rudi Laermans), then conversations have the fading away of contingency as a given, as humans seem to pass a life long training of responding the right utterance at the right time. But could one therefor compare an absurd/non-sense conversation with a performance that doesn't transcend the level of contingency. And what about lieing.
For me, LISA proposed a very clear, intriguing performance with a lot of similarities to the kick of blind-dating. The necessity of a clear relationship between audience and performer, social behaviour not only in a performance context and the urge or necessity to communicate were some of the main issues of the performance for me. It`s fantastic to encounter performers, to not feel intimidated by being included in the performance but rather feeling responsible for keeping the performance going. To awake the illusion of becoming friends with someone during the perormance and after just realise that it was an illusion though. I can only advise everyone who might have the opportunity to participate in "Structural Multifunctions" to do so.

Franziska

Aug 13, 2006
Jonathan Burrows & Matteo Fargion
The Quiet Dance

they come together into the empty stage and a singing bird comes with them.
like a man falling down from a building and smashing into the floor.
ahhhhh. ahhhhh. ahhhhh. ahhhhh. ahhhhh. ahhhhh. ahhhhh.

the bird is no longer singing. shhhhh. the man is no longer falling down or it doesn't look like it. up and down, up and down on a short diagonal. the steps look like a fast foward of a man walking on the moon / someone with impossibly heavy legs that steps on a gum every step / someone that carefully, even if it doesn't look carefull, places each foot on imaginary marks on the floor.

over and over again. with the sensation that you know what is to come but you never get it right. almost, but not right. one might wonder "what the hell are they doing there?".

the birds comes back to sing, they clap and rest. the two men like each other and by them we tend to like them. 1,2,3, 1,2,3, 1,2,3, 1,2,3, . they start moving on diferent directions and one realizes that there is a larger stage around them.
ahhhhh ahhhhh ahhhhh ahhhhh ahhhhh ahhhhh ahhhhh
ahhhhh ahhhhh ahhhhh ahhhhh ahhhhh ahhhhh ahhhhh

looks like two kids/old men playing. the italian men can't help looking up at the kid laughing at them and at another point engages on a short discussion with the english man over some mistake. the two are too funny to be true.
clap rest.

the quiet dance starts engaging some movements on the torso and the dialog is now in between themselves, their own bodies, the space, rhythm and us and it's a very articulate dialogue.

they look at each other, they look at each others feet and arms, they look at themselves, they look at the floor besides them as if checking an invisible score. they look concentrated. the bird comes and goes. they reassure each other that they`re on the right way.

Jonathan tries to find the right pitch while Matteo says ahhhhh.

you're reminded that a decrescendo ahhhhh reminds you of a fall. so they actually fall, picture by picture.

now they also move like skyiers or like someone cleaning dogshit from the soles of the feet and one invites the other for some ballroom dancing. back and foward, back and foward. ah um ah um ah um. after 40 minutes of repetitive quiet dancing they no longer need to do it. we can do it ourselves, they just need to point out a way.

clap-rest-BO-applause

how to be formal and yet not boring; interesting and meaningless.

Gabriel Schenker

Aug 13, 2006
Emio Greco|PC
"Hell"


Eight minutes before nine o’clock, the public it is still coming in and the performance starts. Interesting beginning, definitively refreshing the usual choice of aesthetics from this company. On stage there is a rock concert and each dancer becomes the star from the several songs, which some of the tunes are like, together tonight, on a Saturday night, mambo, the time has come…

The door is turn on and “Hell” begins.

Inspired by Dante’s Inferno and the V Symphony from Beethoven.
Big wonder about the content from this piece, I could not catch any power in it.
The whole piece is made by such a clear images that their potential gets lost by trying to be so readable.

The wish to be so narrative + without any honest desire + such a strong concept as “Hell” = the end product did not have anything to be made of, so it became very superficial.

The musical choices were the only possible trigger to go from one situation to another, consequence from that the eye of the room become flat, boring. Definitively you could see a lot of effort in it but it was a very empty Hell…

Finally it seems as if all what it matters is where to put the movements from Emio, and the context it does not make any difference. Even though I find his movement material very strong that is not at all enough to create a strong composition.

I could enjoy the dancer which was there as a shadow.

Raquel

Aug 13, 2006
DD Dorvillier
No Change or 'freedom is a psycho-kinetic skill'

a reading…
she is still. she is part of the rest. it is hard to tell any difference between the architectural space, the objects that occupy the space and her body. once she changes her spot, she starts re-placing objects, changing the source of the sound and changing the visibility of the space. while changing the space, she is also moving her body according to space. a clear conflict emerges between her changing the other and her being changed by the other. she seems incapable of making decisions without any spatial reference, while, on the other hand, she is the one setting the space, thereby, her own references. little accidents are produced.

this conflict turns very soon into convergence. it becomes harder and harder to talk about a space without her or her without the space. it is also hard to tell if the source of the sound is a prerecorded cd, her voice, the piano or the space. is the audience part of the space or not? do clothes belong to her body or not? does her shadow follow her or does she move according to her shadow? borders get more and more blurred. the autonomy of the space and the autonomy of the body are lost. they depend on each other in order to keep moving and changing. it seems that both rely on each other to define themselves as a whole.


I would argue that the piece was different from what the title seemed to be proposing. There was change, but no freedom...

begüm erciyas

Aug 13, 2006
DD Dorvillier
No Change or 'freedom is a psycho-kinetic skill'

a reading…
she is still. she is part of the rest. it is hard to tell any difference between the architectural space, the objects that occupy the space and her body. once she changes her spot, she starts re-placing objects, changing the source of the sound and changing the visibility of the space. while changing the space, she is also moving her body according to space. a clear conflict emerges between her changing the other and her being changed by the other. she seems incapable of making decisions without any spatial reference, while, on the other hand, she is the one setting the space, thereby, her own references. little accidents are produced.

this conflict turns very soon into convergence. it becomes harder and harder to talk about a space without her or her without the space. it is also hard to tell if the source of the sound is a prerecorded cd, her voice, the piano or the space. is the audience part of the space or not? do clothes belong to her body or not? does her shadow follow her or does she move according to her shadow? borders get more and more blurred. the autonomy of the space and the autonomy of the body are lost. they depend on each other in order to keep moving and changing. it seems that both rely on each other to define themselves as a whole.


I would argue that the piece was different from what the title was proposing. There was change, but no freedom…

begüm erciyas

Aug 12, 2006
Ann Liv Young
Solo

11th(?) of April
I'm sitting in the nighttrain from Utrecht to Amsterdam. Forever burned into my inner eye: a young blond girl, Paris Hilton look-a-like, smearing chocolate sauce into her asshole and then spreading it to the audience. First encounter with Ann Liv Young. People were screaming in the audience, happy and freed by the obscenity displayed by this outraging young ladies from the United States of America. What a show.
6th of August
I'm in the theater, Ann Liv Young again. Right next to me an old man, who constantly has to change the level of his hearing aid. His look switches constantly between stage and program folder. On stage, a cacophony of noise, nudity, screams, little dances. I feel like in New York, 1978. Punkrock goes performance. Ann bangs a drum, „sings“ and occasionaly insults the technician, for not turning her up all the way to 120 dezibel. „You're so fucking german!!!“. That was low, but funny. What we are getting served tonight, is neither original, ingenious, poetic or new. Balloons, popsongs, fake pissing on stage, chocolate sauce, asshole spreading, confessions of having an abortion, playing the innocent slut, etc. We have seen it or heard about it, it has been done before. I'm feeling slightly amused seeing this being done in such an environment as the Kasino. I look at deeply worried faces of viennese middle class theatre goers. But even the imperial Vienna of the late 19th century has seen this already, there are accounts of revolting and extreme cabaret artists who were urinating into the audience. So what? I still love what happens in front of me. I feel cleaned by the intensity of the show, I adore the ferocious energy and the meaness that the performers lead by Ann Liv Young display. I'm not subject to their attempts to upset me, I don't care if this curly haired girl is pregnant or not, I don't care if she gets an abortion, but I affected by the high pitch voice, she speaks in, and the fear and embarresment, that is very, very close under the surface. Even dear Ann has it. But I miss the blond girl, that was in the first version. I heared her name is Adrianne, that she's an amateur in fact and that she sells sunglasses in a shop in Manhattan. I will never forget the terror in her eyes. I smell Antonin Artaud in the air. It's all there: the fragmented text, the mutilated body, the distorted voice.

9th of August
I meet Ann Liv Young in the Schauspielhaus. What a grim face. I don't feel like approaching her. She has the social aura of a Stafford terrier. Coming home, I find a programm of Solo in the kitchen and take it disretly to my room. I read and I am surprised. The artist is revealing her motives:

i will stand here for the rest of my life, if i have to if i have to prove to you people that i am worthy
that i have the courage to stand here and feel horrible and aweful
and humiliated and lonely
i will

Again Artaud. This sounds like the upset letter he wrote to Andre Breton after his very last show in 1948. Some would probably like to burn me on a stake for comparing these two so different figures. But where the fuck did the outrage, the screams and the discomfort go? Will you please fucking show it to me? I'm sick of going to the theatre and having things on display. I don't want to be entertained, I don't want to be educated. I want porn and I'm not talking about ass and tits, but a pornographic and explicit expressivity. Real revolting moments. I want to see people rip their existence and their human figure apart in front of me.

11th of August
I'm writting the report on Solo. I'm thinking about her next work. What more can we expect? A Dirty Sanchez?


Georg aka Performance-Shorsh

Aug 11, 2006
Miguel Gutierrez
Exhibitionist Retrospective

In this text I will not give my assessment of this work. Instead I will concentrate on the questions which it has generated in relation to the creator and his environment.



Miguel Gutierrez has Colombian parents but has grown up in the USA (this interests me for I am Colombian and have always lived in Colombia).



Given this context I have come to ask myself whether Miguel Gutierrez could have created this work if he had lived in Colombia and my answer would be: No.



In general Colombian productions try to conserve a classical narration from the point of view of time, space, rhythm and movement. This could be given by the fact that usually there is a desire to reconstruct an image, a concept or a form in which we can receive a reflection of ourselves.



But in M.G: presentation I felt the exact opposite. There was a desire to change the image of an exhibitionist retrospective or rather to show its multiple possibilities through repetition. Repetitions of his own image, of his voice, a fusion of time and recordings of moments of his life.



He shows the spectator an “I” that screams, that slams himself on the floor, who laughs, makes fun of things and is provocative.



It’s the sensations that I felt that make me feel that this Exhibitionist Retrospective couldn’t have been created in Colombia. I think individuals react in this way when they live in societies which benefit from clearly established social and financial structures to which individuals have the need and possibility of reacting to, to the point of disintegrating aesthetically.



But in Colombia, where the government is weak, there are no clearly established financial or social structures. Individuals tend to recognize themselves in a coherent structure (“Coherent” aesthetic creations). This is a way of constant construction of an identity which never comes to being in a society which tries to encompass its own citizens.



BellaLuz Gutierrez De la Torre.

Colombia.

Aug 10, 2006
Impure Company/ HOOMAN SHARIFI

"we failed to hold this reality in mind"




HOOMAN SHARIFI
"we failed to hold this reality in mind"

When you arrive at Hooman Sharifi's performance, you discover that you are actually going to spend an entire hour together with him, within his very personal space.
I had the sensation that I'm not in a theatre but in a more intimate place. You don't get the feeling that your presence disturbs him, on the contrary: he takes care of you having a good place, for you to receive "his story" comfortable....(and he's not acting that, so it is possible!...)
But you soon discover that nothing is comfortable and nothing should be: direct images and no hidden reactions inside this performance - not like in real life...
I suddenly start to miss home...
We can try to burn the images, throw them away....but we cannot forget...we are not supposed to be allowed to forget! We are travelling....we are carring everything with us .....all the garbage that we have collected during our life....all our sadness, and also our happiness...
He moves until he falls....he starts again...we live whitout knowing and we know whitout admitting...
It looks like it's not up to him...he moves as this will be the last thing he will do....!
You hope that he will look into your eyes....He looks into your eyes.......He does not play the victim, he does not accuse , he does not complain... he stays there and smiles at you...and you find yourself smilling too....And you feel helpless...
you are not helpless. He did "his job" whitout protecting you or himself...When all of us, we are all doing our jobs...
Then, maybe we'll see many performances in places like Schauspielhaus!!!

I'm very happy then i have met Hooman Sharifi!

Andreea Capitanescu, Romania.

Aug 10, 2006
Raimund Hoghe
Young People, Old Voices

My overall impression = Very strange, mysterious, romantic, sweet yet sad and little bit mad children’s picture book

One by one, dreamy reminders of childhood memory folds open in a worn out pastel color, accompanied by various nostalgic songs. Many of the songs were love songs. These memories were sometimes sweet, sometimes energetic, sometimes mellow, sometimes sad and sometimes dramatic.

With his sad wistful voice, Raimund started by introducing each performer as if they are characters in a computer game or story that’s about to start. He is a conductor who directs the others (young people). Young people had personalities you could see even in the way each of them walked on stage, but most of the time their collective identity as a group was more apparent than their individual identity. The way he called each person to get performers on stage made them look like they are perhaps hypnotized by Raimund. It seemed they were simply going to do whatever he tells them to do.

I looked at space in between people, and heard wood floor cracking underneath their feet. Something made me very aware of space and time. When they were walking together they moved the space (wave). There was something sacred about this performance. Washing your hands with that particular water scooper they have used is done in Japan at temples for cleansing body before praying. Performers were very careful about how they move, how they look and how they carry themselves – each and every single gesture. Somehow I have a feeling that Raimund appreciate properness and details of Japanese culture.

Is this a strange movie or a mysterious ritual?
Is this Raimund’s personal memories or fantasy?

Most of the time, what they did is repetitions of simple act. I would find it robotic and automatic if I only looked at what they were doing physically. But the mood of it, how they did this each act so carefully with full commitment made everything seem real. They did it with real feelings or internal focus that goes with this act.

Jelly fresh poem “nothing left but bit of jelly flesh”

Measuring of demi plie/ height

This whole work made me really feel the power of music.
Rite of Spring music shifted the air of whole space. He shows the full drama of music with small scale, very musical and comical simple actions. I learned he was a dramaturge of Pina Bausch’s Rite of Spring. Why did he decide to bring it out? The red scarf made an appearance also… Is this the way he would choreograph to Rite of Spring now or if without Pina?

Billy Elliot “like fire, like electricity”
DANCE
“One more time, more light, more sound, more dance!!”
Does he do this because he loves dance like Billy? Or is he being ironic somehow?

Children’s innocent play with paper planes all the sudden changes into an image of fighting. WAR. Music change made me think perhaps these are not children playing paper plane but young adults playing war game.

Raimund has sudden outbursts of strange humors and breaks the “performance mode” occasionally. These breakings are refreshing and keep this performance alive.
When I realize he is playing dress-up game and feeding the grapes to a boy and asking the boy to feed him.
“I want you to want me” – the song
Is this his fantasy?
“I set you free” – says the song, Raimund goes off.

What a strange performance!
(I don’t attempt to round it up because the performance was bit like my writing.)


After thought: We talked in a danceWEB salon how Rite of Spring has been one of the important dance because it speaks about basic law of our community. How community always have to have seclusion in a community for it to be a community. ...Perhaps Raimund was this “seclusion” in his own dance?!

-Sayaka

Aug 09, 2006
Par B.Leux/Benoît Lachambre
Délire Défait

Délire Défait – review undone

The premiere of Délire Défait was in february 1999 in the Musée d’art contemporain in Montréal. I remember the „solo“ from seeing it a few days ago.
Délire Défait – the undoing of the state of being - I enjoyed the kind of liquid quality of the transformational performance - exposing fragmented memories and reflecting documents of a passage in life... une étrange adventure... like strolling in Alphaville... a kind of mysterious bodyprosa...

Aus dem Programmheft:
„Ein aufgelöstes Delirium, ein Tanz, eine Installation, eine Performance und ein Selbstportrait.“

Sometimes reality is too complex for written communication.

There are hints of autobiographic information: ici et là - as the elaborate stage design by Nadia Lauro indicates by affixed letters upstage and at the front edge of the stage. Benoît crossed this edge several times...physically, mentally and morally:
post-apokalyptische Zähmung / post-apocalyptic taming.

Your eyes have returned from a despotic land where no one has known the meaning of a glance.

I follow traces...with the force of the tides...
sportive outlines...a podium with a red carpet on which a TV is placed accuratly as well as a camera pointing at the performer.

I am a documentary junkie!

Komplexe Körpergeständnisse. Multilayered confessions.

The performance starts and ends with smoking and talking...we listen to: „ ...information in little boxes...sometimes we will use them.“ Benoît explains some of it ...like that the painting was made by his friend 26 years ago and that they discussed if it’s a frog. Other stories like the stepdancing girl he states are important, but I didn’t get the context.“Let me go“. He danced in a jail.
Benoît asks several times „Why?“

That’s how it is. You never understand anything. Yes, that’s always how it is; you never understand anything.

White noise.
Then I was twenty.
The attack of a seagull. Tears.
Der Schrei der hungrigen Möwe.

In the red circle: le danse de chanteur de charme. Der Tanz des Schnulzensängers. Passion.

I am an asshole.
I’m fucked up.
I’m waiting.
I’m doing nothing.
I’m nothing.

...provided words do not change their meanings and meanings their words.

Restructuration.
Laurent Maslé (sound) and Jean Jauvin (Video/Light) operate on and off stage... extending the performative space without dispersing the focus and Nadia Lauro joins for a short duett which assures that this is a solo.

I see the faces of the people in the audience on the video... before they have seen the performance...some performing for the camera.
Yellow circle. Light.
Hands dancing là. Soft. Fight.
Jumping off stage. Ecoute bien! Hammering against the door.
Back on stage. Boxing and turning head. Illusion.

The meaning of words and of expressions is no longer grasped.
An isolated word, or a detail of a design can be understood. But the meaning of the whole escapes.

A beautiful live-whistling and dance duo with dedication.
Resistance. Ski mask.
Hitting the head against the floor. Violence. Videodocumentation.
Caterpillaric removing of the red line. Turning upside down.
„I feel a little off- center “, he said smiling.

Men who change
Never heard of secret messages.

Benoît concludes lascivious smoking a cigarette wearing the dress that he had swapped with Nadia when remembering a story from his childhood. He wore his sisters clothes. „I don’t have anything more to say. The show is over. Does anybody have any questions?“ A person asks „ How does it end?“ „Like this I guess.“

Silence. Logic. Security. Prudence.

........................................................................................................................................
written by Mariella Greil long after midnight

I decided for a subjective and incomplete resume and did undo my review by quotes (bold text) from a dialog in Jean-Luc Godards Film „Alphaville“ (1965). To put Benoît Lachambres work into more context I recommend the chapter „The attack of the seagull during a delirium undone“ by Helmut Ploebst in „no wind no word“ or http://www.parbleux.qc.ca.

Aug 08, 2006
Hooman Sharifi & Impure Company
WE FAILED TO HOLD THIS REALITY IN MIND

I happened to sit with Hooman around the lunch table in Arsenal a few days after the show, so I asked him the question that I came out of the theatre with: “Which reality were you referring to?”
Hooman answered that It was open for the viewers to find their own reality that they failed to hold, and also that this title was not a strictly confined statement, but rather a poetic and open one.*

Nevertheless, with a mind like mine, together with not knowing anything of Hooman’s personal or artistic history whatsoever, this title was taken very, very seriously. Indeed, my mind was set to enter into the performance, solely armed by this one knowledge.

By the way, I am someone who doesn’t have much apt for descriptions of things. If I read a novel, I would skip long description parts to get to the story. I am much more interested in what happens next. And you know how much details an hour show would have… a lot. So this is what I am going to do here; I will provide a totally rough and unfair description of what I saw, purely for the readers who have already seen the performance so that they can refresh their memory of the show and think back. So, here it comes, you feel free to skip it, too.

'There was this man wearing in his street clothes that I’ve seen him in on previous days, walking around casually and operating music and visuals from a laptop on stage. On stage there are two carpets, I am assuming it is Iranian, a small one placed at the centre of the stage and a big one projected on the back wall. Persian music played on and off. Hooman's dance, something of its own, impressed me with its wild, emotionally powerful, frustrated, going-nowhere quality. He danced and stoped. And danced and stoped. And danced and stoped. He played with a black cloth with crunched papers under. I have no idea what it is or means. Then there was the projection of photos of Iranian city, houses and people, accompanied by harsh loud mechanical sound. Then there was another projection of the empty seats of the theatre, by the way these descriptions are not in choronological order..., with camera point of view moving along each seat, gazing it for a long time as if there were someone sitting on it.
Hooman would dance and then go to computer and operate, sit, watch the projection, and back out to dance again. He was seemingly coming in and out of his performing state throughout the performance, which, to me, added to the vulnerability of his situation of performing, and performing his own work.
There were light changes, I should mention also, because Hooman mentioned it; first it was on the stage, then on the back wall, making Hooman a dark figure on stage, and then on the audience. He once stood at the front of the stage to give a good long gaze to the audience one at a time with light on audience.'
This is pretty much what I saw as separately and fragmented as I was able to describe.

Now, coming back to my story next; which reality did we fail to hold in mind? The realities I possibly thought of are these: A reality of Hooman as a performer on stage who is meeting the gaze of the audience. A reality of his private world of feelings or experiences that he was entering in and out of during the performance. A reality of Iranian life with its people and land.

In the first reality, it is right there, it is existential, it is beyond Hooman's or my control. It is a happening and he can only address it. Yes, he was there meeting me, us, and he seemed to me so vulnerable, in that strange, intimate place. What about the meeting did he want say, or did he want to say anything about it? In the second one, I say ‘private’ because it didn’t become of something that I could make connection to. It was clear to me that he was having connections, but I didn’t get to know what that was. Iranian life, too, I saw it and I didn’t know what Hooman thought or felt about it. I didn't feel I was taken or invited to a place where I was free to make my own connections.

I am still concerned about story. Did Hooman have something that he wanted to say about any reality? Or was it just to point out that there might be realities that we might want to think about? Does story goes anywhere or is it just a description of things that I skipped through?


I was trying to navigate my way into this unknown journey through the performance with one thing that I knew, the question posed, the title. It was as though I was walking though a corridor with this one key in my hand, and it did not open any doors into Hooman’s or my own world. Now I know what reality I failed to hold in mind: I failed to hold this reality in mind that the key I had could been the wrong one, and even that there is no key.


Min Kyoung Lee


* The quotes of Hooman’s are reconstructed from my unreliable memories and subjective understanding of the given information. Any blames of misinformation should rightly be placed on me, but Hooman, no bomb on my bicycle, okay?

Aug 08, 2006
BENOIT LACHAMBRE/PAR B.L.EUX
DELIRE DEFAIT

The performance ended, that’s what Benoit just said, but he still there: half trapped inside his own self-portrait, smoking another sigarette…
I am sitting on my chair, second row at the Schauspielhaus, unable to leave the theatre, My heart is beating fast and my hands are shacking. I’m not sure if to cry or smile; I do both. I stare at him and I don’t want to leave the space: I just want to hold on to this atmosphere and to my feelings. I have never responded so strongly to a performance.

It is actually difficult for me to define “Delire Defait” just as a performance. It integrated so many different levels of communication that I felt I was rather having a direct experience.

Benoit dived deep into his personal delirium where memories, information, lies, reality, images and stories break into small fragments. They don’t make sense anymore, they overlap but we still try to understand and find a little box in our head where they can fit.
It doesn’t work though. Nothing stands still, events starts to flow and there’s nothing left stable to hold on to.
I let go and start following his delirium through empathy rather than understanding. He reached many exteremes but I never felt detatchement, I never percieved the stage as an image: his changes of states could resonate in my own body.

He was so vulnerable and powerful at the same time. He had no restrictions, he wasn’t pretending. Even lies were real because of his true engagement in the action of lying.

His body funcioned as an open channel that allowed everything to exist. All the fragments of his delirium were existing so strongly in his body, voice and eyes. Any event would reach its extreme in his body and then leave space for the next state, in a constantly shifting un/balance.

He can show his weackness just as they are. No extra aesthetic or costructions on top. This makes him so powerful. His honesty is disarming, He has no fear.

My thoughts starts expanding, my back freeze and for a moment I think I could let go of my fears too. That anything can happen, exist, be fully felt and then pass, if it is accepted just as another event. Even death could just be an event that passes through the body and dissolves it on the ground…but this thought doesn’t fit in any of my little boxes and now it already feels so far.

In the delirious attempt of defining himself, Benoit offered another possibility (at least to me): the one of accepting your own self as a multiple ever-changing undefinable being.


Valentina Desideri

Aug 05, 2006
Jerome Bel
The show must go on

the show must go on or who keeps listening for longer.
who dares to take over.
who breaks the dictatorship.
where are the adjacencies of
surprise, anticipation, expectation.
and the humour of connections.
connotations.
who is the victim?
we, who appreciate to make relations,
explore familiar situations and feel that
we can follow easily.
there is a pattern to hold on to. yes.
we love the event of recognition.
we sneak in to catch some attention.
we place ourselves and we are placed. in the seat.
and the play of the gap between the audience and stage space is activated.
who is looking?
sharing the gaze.
where is the performance. you have to look for it. discover.
it is an adventure.
a d v e n t u r e.
but you are excluded, are you?.
change it.
it is yours.
or
waiting, emptiness
unconscious consciousness.

the audience as living animal moves constantly the heat away.
the creature of fans.
once filling the gay of the song itsself, taking over the lead.
knitting themselves into the pattern.
another time the stage people reverse the dictatorship
and decide upon the music choice.
people look at each other.
the animal is alive and could pop up anywhere, close and far.
it is an awareness training.
or
who is enjoying who?



ina

Aug 03, 2006
MARCO BERRETTINI *Melk Prod
No Paraderan

The biggining of this work potrays egocentricity and vocabulary challenges between ballet and contemporary dance.I think its just a mere concept behind the deferences and the commonalities of dance. The idea is addressed to us by the two dancers wearing their mid 60's fancy costumes(i assume) at the openining scene. We are aslo introduced to the fanciness and glamourous life of these dancers with a bottle of champaign and the theatrical asapects of their choreographic acts.

The work does not potray an ellusion of life but shows us a clear sense of how other people live thier lives.Coming from my own pesperctive i think we ussualy get introduced to artists/choreographers who brings works to the stage and they do not know what they want to say to us.As a result i think Marco's work was the opposite of that.

It was a great comical work of art and was done with expecties and exelence. The performing artists of this work had a good hand at making the piece work because they did not try to make us lough,but they just gave a performace.

Marco created a mood for his work and it kept the piece interesting to watch. The music, lighting and sound,composition and stage set up was well thought and it corresponded with the theme and ocations of events within the performance.

After all that great work, the downfall of the work came to a point where i was sitting and waiting for more dancing to accure but unfortunatley i did not see much of that. For a contemporary a dance platform there should be dance because it is a platform for dance. I think we can still tell our amazing stories incoprehended with movements without loosing the context of the theme.

Non the less it was a greate work of art and it kept my eyes opened especialy after some of the long brainy performances i have seen in the festival.

GUSTIN MAKGELEDISA (SOUTH AFRICA)

Jul 31, 2006
Mathilde Monnier and company
Frere et souer

(They’re fighting, but don’t worry---it’s not Vandekeybus.”)

Derrida once said that “in a relation, there is no “non-narcicism”, there are only more or less acceptable forms of narcicism.” To love the other, there is ultimately the love of the self. I don’t love the “who”, but rather the “what” that I project. Yet the paradox remains, we give and we expect to give back. A form of economics is born, where we value that which we give in relation to that which we get back.

They begin by fighting. But it’s not about an emotional engagement in the act itself that the performer has to reach. In fact, the whole piece had such a refreshingly direct investment in the movements, without needing to display the emotional enactment of the physicality. The difference is immense. We don’t see the performer recalling the affect of a phyical fight, nor simply marking “fight” as a concept. Instead the affect eshews to another level, a more nuetral one. To show something? Maybe not directly. It’s not a metaphor, baby, it’s an action. Yet the effect comes indirectly. I watch with a more precise eye, where the technique of a trained body can surface, and finally I can read this as dance. There’s no pretending that we need to display the emotion. Why can’t today’s Macho Choreographers learn a bit of this sensibility.

So that’s the how, and now the what. Beyond my emotional engagement (I can finally enter when someone isnt filling the stage with meaning and affect) there is the relational game. There is a difference in what we need of the other, what we want of the other. These duets and trios were not so much staged fighting as they choreographies allowing bodies to be in a relation of dependancy and control. I can see a body needing the other, and I can see a body deciding to manipulate or disempower the other. The levels begin to pile on, the physical task, given by the choreography, the choice of the performer to enable or disable it, and of course, my engagement as witness. When the physicality begins to point to the enabling and disabling of an action, I see the body as a tool for understanding, not emotion. But as emotional beings, we have this level to deal with as well. Noone said it would be a only a thinking piece.

A wig can do so much to nuetralize the body as a tool, not a character. I assume masks were used in Greek Tragedies for the same reason. The person was not the issue. The result of relational structures were.

The icon of the rock musician, in ultimate catharsis. had place here, silent as a mouse, fumbing through the motions we all recognize. Since communication is only the acknowledgement that a previous communication was attempted, we can only go on making these utterances. No AC/DC necessary.

The text was effective in it’s simplicity. Actually, the words could have been taken directly from any average pop song. The classic duality is of course “I love you and I cant live without you, or you don’t love me so hit the road, Jack.” It’s with this simplicity that the complexity of movement can soar. The details are in the doing, not the metaphor.

In the end, we live and die alone. Once the partnering ended, I remember a sense of relief to see the dancing body alone. Alone, doesn’t mean lonely, but we could hit this emotional nerve as well, since we are emotional capable. These solo dances easily enable the spectator to enter just as easily as the fighting. Here a the body can only try, and all together does not make chaos, it reaffirms what the context has established. We utter and we utter. We can only go on uttering.
Shame it had to end so soon, but as in life (METAPHOR!), all good things must come to end….




written in stream of conciousness while late for class by Domenico Giustino

Jul 31, 2006
Barbara Kraus
Fuck All That Shit!!

The whole Iggy Pop meets Mtv music Awards, Studio54ishque, red carpet, VIP meets red neck, psycho, abnormal, rock slash country slash new wave slash electro clash, mix with surreal characters (slimy beings, woman in spiderman masks), drug dependent shitty talking characters, punk icons and their groupies, a carnival of freaks dressed in their Halloween's best!! in a theater converted into a junk shop meets art noveu cafe was exciting or maybe not. Audience were treated to be voyeur to a fucked up freak show. If the whole point of the performance was to make the audience feel alienated and vomit about the whole experience the production in all means achieved it. Personally, it felt like a virtual reality ride in a roller coaster without any exciting drops or escalating loops. It was a stagnant ride, more like an underground train rather than a kick-ass rollercoaster. Right from the start the performance failed to create the anticaption of the audience to be part of the whole experience. The host at the lobby who mentioned name of stars who will present that night didn't make any impact at all. It just added to the confusion of the whole idea. The different themes in the different areas of the theater was quite impressive. I like how things clashed. It was really ambitious to have a cast of thousand but the consistensy of the show failed. Some performers are dropping character, others are not reacting to the audience who were openly playing with them which i find really weird. It destroyed the illusion of the whole concept. It was a brave production i must say. A very good study of human shitiness...What makes a human feel shitty? or look shitty? act shitty? talk shitty?. Our shitty aesthetic may differ from one another, but we still connect in a certain shitty way regardless of how shitty the world is, and i could not care less. We just need to fuck all that shit after all!

(review by: a drug dependent yearning for love freak- Jethro Pioquinto)

Jul 30, 2006
Needcompany
Isabella`s room

This is my second visit to Isabella`s room. Last autumn in Amsterdam I sat in the third row and was so emotionally involved that I couldn`t help falling in love with the piece. Isabella and her story spoke straight to my heart. I remember writing in my diary:
"This is the kind of theater I want to make! It's like a musical without all the cliches and predictability of plot. It`s refreshing, playful, accessible to a broad audience and very human."

This second time, sitting way up back in the theater, created some distance and a more critical point of view. I wished for everybody and especially for myself to enjoy it as much as I had enjoyed it last year. Instead I found myself confronted with the following questions:
Isn`t the piece maybe a bit too fluffy and lightweight in comparison with some other more conceptually radical pieces I have seen so far in the ImpulsTanz Festival (such as Umwelt and Miguel Guiterrez` solo)? What does my infatuation with Isabella`s room say about me as a person? What does it say about me as an artist with a critical choreographer`s mind in training? Is my hunger for "art and inspiration" too easily satisfied by sappy entertainment and sentimentality?
I don`t mean to say that the characters were too emotionally indulging. None of them except maybe Anna and Arthur (Isabella`s parents) were really milking it.
In fact most parts, and especially the part of Isabella, were played in a rather dry and casual manner.
But Jan Lauwers, the director, clearly uses the tools of musical theater to his advantage: the collective breaking out into song moments, the chronological storyline, the jokes here and there. It is a feel-good musical after all -
despite its innovative twist and turns.
But is it really that original? If we look at it as a musical it`s certainly not a conventional one.
Lauwers introduces all the performers and the characters they will play in his introduction speech. Besides Isabella`s parents, her grandson Frank, and her lover the desert prince, there are three obviously well-trained dancers who embody the left and right hemispheres of Isabella`s brain and her erogenous zone, respectively. The erogenous zone-guy also functions as the narrator.
The phenomenon of using performers of varying technical training in an ensemble-based show has apparently become a trend in contemporary dance/theater.
Lauwers remains onstage for the whole show as an onlooker to the action, occasionally stepping in for a song or taking the role of director when correcting an actor`s mistake. All the sound is generated by members of the ensemble and there is even a live translator onstage who transforms the French and English text into German subtitles on the back wall. I like this concept of stripping down the mechanics of performance making, even though it has been used a lot in contemporary theater. It`s about showing the process instead of presenting a product. So it`s a musical stripped bare!
One scene that stuck me as conspicuously unoriginal in my second viewing was Anna`s funeral, where the whole cast lift Anna into floating space while she gets to sing her death song into a suspended microphone. Last year this act moved me deeply and made me think of Bjoerk`s emotional outbursts in Dancer in the Dark. Now I was suddenly reminded of identical or very similar physical constellations in Pina Bausch`s choreographic contribution to the film Talk to Her, of Berettini`s No Paraderan from the previous night and of scenes from Rosas productions.
But what is Isabella`s room actually about? Basically it is the story of a blind, old woman who remembers her past and the people who occupy it. This woman lives in a room in Paris with a huge collection of anthropological objects from Africa, which she inherited from her father. The stage looks like a museum with hundreds of African art objects, real and projected ones. In Amsterdam I was very much intrigued and impressed by this detailed and intricate scenery. Thanks to my close seat I could zoom in and explore everything at my discretion.
Last year one of my favorite scenes was actually the presenting of the art objects, where the performers in a "show and tell" kind of event pick up objects from the collection and present them to the audience in a very unique way by attributing them with all the emotional importance and value these objects have in Isabella`s life. The performer presenting a giant turtle, an object loathed by Isabella, does this with a lot of enraged screaming and tensed up fists.
Here in Vienna I could barely make out the objects, let alone the performers' facial expression, from my seat. From so far back the stage design had a scattering and disconcerting effect on me.
I had a similar problem with the use of dance. In some scenes the dancing seemed casual and random (people were dancing about in an upstage corner while Isabella was having a serious conversation with the spirit of her dead mother downstage left).
So what about this magical mix of dance, music, and theater that managed to enchant me last October - is it only working from up close?
Apparently so. The show as a whole didn`t reach me fully this time. What for sure still worked for me was the storytelling and the humanity leading through the piece like a red thread from Isabella`s birth to her old age. It`s an autobiographic musical! A musical turned inside out. Isabella`s soul and her strength and lust for life came across despite the big gap between me and the stage. I am still in love with Isabella! Vivianne de Muynck is no doubt a terrific actress and Isabella an admirable character!

Chris Leuenberger

Jul 29, 2006
Maguy Marin & CCN Rillieux-La-Pape

Umwelt

Umwelt: Environment

Simply everything repeated
And multiplied
Each unique action deconstructed
Each unique person reflected
How are we different to each other?
Each story told once and again
Misery and hypocrisy of every day
Inclusive (of me)
Addict to lays
Addict to lays
Bite a little bit deeper
Is bitter
But real
Is it real?

I am not tired of watching
Each repeated action
Is unique
Each one, responsible for itself (on its own)
Alone, unique, vulnerable and powerful, fearful and daring
Perturbing
Faked
Repeated
Edited
Disturbed
And repeated in the tribune
By not assuming
By not confronting
By not committing
By not sharing
By refusing
Is it painful?
You should thank you only see it on stage!!!
You are judging again
I am judging again

If they would at least lower this noise
The noise is inside you (me)
And it will still be there when we leave this room
(That’s the idea!!!)

(Ears terrorism?)
I was truly worried about my ears at a certain point,
But then that “problem” was also relative
(To what I was being reminded about by the piece)


An explicit demand for the audience to commit and stay curious on how much we can be transformed by watching the same thing in different ways many times.

How many different memories and feelings can the same image trigger?

How many different meanings can the same action have?

It demands a confrontation and acceptance of an inner journey, and a constant dialogue among that journey and the ongoing repetition of isolated images that, all together, create a narrative of daily absurdity.

It is a reminder of the relativity of things

It is a reminder of the strength of simplicity

Meaning is created by the image syntaxes as well as by the memories and identification of the audience with those images.

And the question: for how long can I (we) stand this situation?
(Inside or outside the theater?)




Valeria Primost

Jul 29, 2006
Maguy Marin
UMWELT

"Ich liebe das klassische Balet mit seinem Formenkanon, aber ich habe das Gefühl, dass ich mit diesen Formen nicht über das heutige Leben erzählen kann...", hat M.Marin im Gespräch fürs "Standart" gesagt. Ich fand es sehr interessant zum Nachdenken, weil meiner Meinung nach hat M.Marin wirklich über das heutige Leben erzählt.
Ihre Aufführung "Umwelt" war sehr intensiv zum schauen. Ich blieb nachher wie "ausgelöscht". Je mehr ich aber über ihre Aussage nachdenke, desto mehr ich sehe, dass M.Marin eine Choreografin mit dem "grossen CH" ist. Alles auf der Bühne hatte einen ganz bestimmten Platz, bestimmte Bedeutung und nichts war einfach "mehr als es nötig würde." Die ganze Aufführung mit ihren "Spiegelungen" hat auf mich stark gewirkt. Bestimmte Situationen auf der Bühne könnte man als Spiegel zu unserem Leben sehen. Wir alle sind Teil eines Kreises, Zyklus - vielleicht Teufelskreises - der heutigen Welt. Unseres Leben ist schnell, konzum voll von Workoholismus...Die Tänzer (oder besser gesagt - Performer) haben sich schnell durch viele Spiegeln auf der Bühne bewegt, sie sind schnell verschwunden, damit sie wieder in einer anderen, neuen Situation eintauchen könnten...Es könnte heutigen schnellen "Verschiebungen" oder Reisen im Raum und Zeit anzusprechen. Leute leben heutzutage schnell, wie wenn uns eine imaginäre Kraft immer vorwärts schieben würde...Wo bleibt der Raum zum entspannen?
Die Performer haben zivile Gesten und Körperausdrücke wie Laufen, Stehen, Gehen...als Sprache gebraucht und waren sehr prezis in dem. M.Marin verwendet auch viele Rekvisitäten, bei dennen man sich oft viele Fragen stellt. Trägt man z.B.ein grosses Stück Fleisch auf den Rücken und gerade nachher eine nackte Frau...wird Körper auch als eine "Sache" angeschaut. Plötzlich sieht alles so relativ aus.
Der Kreis wiederhollt sich. M.Marin arbeitet viel mit der Wiederholung und Beschleunigung der Situation. Sie zieht unsere Aufmerksamkeit an, in dem sie langsamm, aber immer sicher etwas zugibt oder eine Situation verstärkt...Die Natur vermisscht sich mit der "Materie", aus unserem Konzumleben weggeworfenen Sachen.
Zum Schluss liegen auf der Bühne "Sachen", die nicht mehr gebraucht sind. Es ist Fleisch, es sind Äpfeln, Kinder, Steine, Bücher...
M.Marin zeigt und spricht. Die Bedeutungen (vielleicht auch Kritiken) stehen zwischen den Zeilen. Ohne Emotionen, ganz neutral, doch ganz stark, wird gesprochen, "geschrien"...
Obwohl mir die Form Marin's Aussage nicht so nahe ist, muss ich Bravo zu solcher klugen Aufführung sagen.

VERONIKA SIMKOVA, Prag
(sorry für Fehler in meinem Deutsch)

Jul 29, 2006
Jerome Bel & Association R.B.
The Show Must Go On

What is the power of POP songs? To see "The Show Mus Go On", the biggest question appeared on my head. After the performance, my friend, who asked Jerome once, told me that he tried just to play with POP songs. However, structure of this work caused a strange emotional action of the spectators in a theater.

Someone began to dance with a voice of Edit Piaf. Some people began to swing fire of a lighter while playing Imagine. Or sang Sound of Silence in a dark. What happened on the stage was simpler than what on the audience. About 20 or less dancers were waving a waist with the rhythm, having easy steps or taking tiny acting as the lyrics. There is no feeling of so-called 'groove', dance itself did not cause an emotional action of the spectators at all. But also, at the same time, it is rare that the dance disturbed the spectators hearing songs. They could surely hear the songs not as BGM.

In the daily life, at first Pop songs appeal the public widely and aim to seep in them(or as a result, seeped in them). For example, in order to be memorized and be sympathized with easily, they uses the simple melody and rhythm, and the lyric emphasize our common topics such as love, family, teenage and so on. This means they try to make a emotional feeling in listeners. And if they find a crossing point in the listener's individual situation or his/her history, that feeling will be larger, then that crossing point becomes a intense knot. In addition, as listening the songs, sometime we are involved to move, step with the rhythm, shaking, shouting.... That knot entangle this kind of movements too. So in the each person, a particular POP song represents to drag wide range of his/her memory out when he/she hear it again.

I think what happened in "The Show Mus Go On" is caused according that each spectator's memory was called back in this way by the Pop songs. Perhaps Jerome did not expect so, even he wanted to make the show very strange, he imagined that it would be realized just as the "performance." However, the construction of the show itself destroyed the form of that, "performance." In other words, it promoted us to see as the "Phenomenon." There, POP songs, dancers on the stage, choreographer sitting on front and selecting CDs, spectators singing/dancing/swinging/....

We hear so many songs, not only POP songs, recoded in the CDs, MP3s, etc, in the theater. Most of them is used of making the atmosphere. But in fact, any "Performance" are also "Phenomenon". They are certainly in the social, relating so many things. We tend to see the show as in the small world, as in the rule of theater, though there is little strict rules, we are just missing or forgetting most of time. "The Show Mus Go On" made us to be noticed that.

We know sometime the art work is praised for one aspect which was not expected by the artist. I think "The Show Mus Go On" is also, so we should praise Jerome and his talents to offer a such amazing opportunity for us.

Hajime Fujita

Jul 26, 2006
Maguy Marin
Umwelt

and now.
we better leave fast
or.
we watch but we dont see
and.
I.
I am looked at, maybe, sometimes.
meanwhile the elements of my existence are thrown on my plate.
my neighbour is vegan, but the cook gives a shit.
noone was asked anyways, there are no questions.
it is round.
and still moving. thank you. (or me)
but whoever has not finished their plate, its getting a bit hot in here.
[keep reminding me. (keep pointing).]
or
we better leave faster. now.
and.
be aware. who is cooking.
there is a menu, there are choices. still,
someone can not get his finger from off the repeat button.
it is annoying.
and frustrating too.
but we keep swallowing
so fast that we dont taste anymore.
or everything tastes the same.
and we add salt and pepper - for the more advanced: tabasco.
it blurrs. and we struggle to see ourselves in a forest of semi-reflective mirrors. lacan mentioned the essential moment and I looked. later.
we share the same problems although we seem to not be from the same tribe.
we place ourselves, following.
the I in a sea of me(s).
some facts: for example that the string has a beginning and an end.
could be experienced as linear, with dichotomies living in it.
exchanges of images, stories, multiplications.
repetition of ingredients. apple, tree, king, dress, doctor and others.
....
find an end thats already there.
and take it somewhere. please.




ina

Jul 26, 2006
maguy marin and centre choregraphique national de rillieux-la-pape
umwelt

i have to say that, as a whole, i felt this work was successful. i also enjoyed it very much. this is because as an audience member i felt engaged from beginning to end. as soon as i would begin to loose interest i would be pulled in by the haunting and at times sinister images.
with mirrors placed on the stage like that of a warped funhouse, simple images and/or everyday actions would be presented by the performers as they continually weaved in front and behind them to the constant, grating droan of three electric guitars that were placed on stage. the guitars were played by a single string of wire that was pulled across the guitar strings. at the end of the work each guitar's sound effortlessly dropped one by one leaving an air of mystery as to what was to happen next.
i feel like this work was making a comment on the environment, whether it is our own personal one that which surrounds us on a global scale of what is happening in human nature and continues to happen. history seems doomed to repeat itself. sometimes we view ourselves as kings in our own habitats...many times we go through the motions of life...eating,raising families, falling in love, etc. and there are conflicts and confrontations happening not only in our little corner of the world, but on a global scale.
the contant stream of music, dynamic of movement and the element of wind used during the work gave the performance, for me, this sense of time passing by. it also gave the work a feeling of motion even though the performers would execute their steps to the same constant rythem. this effect also produced a sinister quality making me wonder if something horrific was going to happen.
i am sure many people either strongly liked or dislike umwelt. my personal opinion is that it was a journey that i necessarily didn't want to go on but curiosity got the better of me...so much that i wondered what would have happened if the music had not stopped. i encourage everyone to see this work for its strength in imagery and development.

Jul 19, 2006
Maguy Marin
"Umwelt"

Maguy Marin's "Umwelt" presents a horizontal treatment of images, events, signifiers, actions, and objects ranging from the banal and quotidian to the alarming and exigent in a steady stream of appearance and disappearance. The environment created is one of touch-and-go image bytes, emerging and receding from a forest of mirrors that show us often obscured or partial views, and each event is as quickly replaced or erased by the one after. In a semiotic approach to theater that is legible and direct, the challenge in this flat sequence of events is not reading each one, but navigating through the erratic logic of their sequencing. "Umwelt" confronts us with our own perceptions of connection or disconnection, importance/unimportance, causality/acausality, consideration and reconsideration in our attempt to make sense of the relentless stream of images. Marin does not deliver a moral message or a belief system in relationship to the state of affairs which she represents, neither a solution or conclusion, just a portrait of events which reflects most loudly the viewer's own position in relationship to it.

Marin's mess of variably interrelated and isolated actions is a tightly composed augmentation of daily life that remains matter-of-fact but also implies unrest and unease. Several fans offstage create a constant wind blowing onstage that pushes the forest of mirrors into motion and adds a surreal sense of urgency or chaos to all events within it. The musical environment is created by a mechanically driven spool of string dragging across three amplified electric guitars at once, sometimes in surges of volume or bouncing across the strings to create a sound like helicopters passing overhead. Marin creates an all-encompassing state of emergency in the air around the actions themselves.

In repetition, simple objects are recombined or replaced, actions and their meanings become altered or mixed-up, sometimes making potential narrative sense with the alteration, sometimes making dissonance or nonsense with the recombination. I am reminded only conceptually of William Forsythe's "Three Atmospheric Studies," in which he calls upon the "fog of war" concept of conflation and the question of causality within interlocking systems of power, conflict and violence. In Marin's "Umwelt" and Forsythe's "...Studies," the theater is used as a space to practice perception, and it's political implications are in the modes of understanding that are called into action therein.

As images materialize and dematerialize, the only thing that manages to accumulate actual weight (physically and symbolically) is the waste; what is left of consumption, destruction, and violence. On the front half of the stage, the performers discard food, clothing, chicken bones, dirt, bricks, wigs... eventually the babies they were once playfully holding in the air are drop-kicked into the rubble pile as well. Women fall forward onto the floor and are dragged off by men in military helmets. As the actions become sporadically more violent and bizarre, more disturbing and confusing, the foreground becomes filled with their refuse and by-products.

Periodically someone comes to the front of the forest of mirrors, standing at the edge of the momentarily lit front half of the stage in a suspension of time before the steady pace resumes. The meaning of this pause changes as the piece proceeds: Initially, the person facing front is standing before an empty stage, on a brink of possibility (will she dance for us?) but finally, with the accumulation of waste, this person is standing on the precipice of a disaster scene, a non-traversable wasteland between us and her/him/them. Eventually, what was a comma becomes a question mark becomes a period. Suspense becomes paralysis, possibility becomes impossibility, a breath between becomes a confrontation about, a moment of expectation becomes a moment of memory, looking forward becomes looking back. The same act of doing nothing offers a different function in relation to the whole with each repetition. While context distorts the meaning of all repeated actions in the piece, this polysemous structuralist reality seems most apparent in this most simple action. Perhaps that is the nature of such didactic modes of presentation: because the audience is engaged in the act of quite literally reading what is shown, less can actually be more, because it is an unusual moment of opening rather than closing via representational specification.

Though partially attributable to the trouble of watching a performance with pen in hand, I find "Umwelt" so legible, so demonstrative, so readable that I still wonder what it offers as an experience. Marin chooses to say those things that she thinks ought to be said even if we all may say "but we know." An easy criticism of this work is to say that one doesn't need to see "what is" in the theater because we can see "what is" everywhere else, the counter-point of course being that confrontation with these realities in the places where we don't expect them has a certain impact on how we process them elsewhere.

It's clear in the past few pieces that Marin is questioning what performance can do, questioning its value or its position, her position in the world as a maker of dances. Instead of abandoning ship she stays in as a provocateur. She risks biting the hand that feeds her and does it anyway, even as she loses subsidies and mainstream support. All this shows her rebel spirit, activist hunger and critical capacity. What lacks challenge perhaps, or what remains politically under-addressed is the mechanism of the theater itself and her relationship to structures of production. Subsidies or less, she remains within a system of art-production that is built from, caters to, and perpetuates a certain privilege and value-system, reaches a certain audience, supplies a certain demand, and thereby ultimately satisfies what it tries to disturb - we leave the theater feeling good that she made this work, agreeing with it's intentions, or we leave angry that we didn't get the entertainment we wanted. In that sense, is it more important as a piece for those who walked out mid-way than those who stay for three curtain-calls? But do we go to the theater to be taught about life outside the theater? How else can the thing itself be political? I do not attempt to say that just because Umwelt is provocative or challenging or includes images of war that Marin now carries extra responsibility to prove her total politicality. I just wonder what would result if Marin would permeate her criticality further outside of the product itself, to manifest in the circumstances surrounding its production and presentation, not as a mention of these circumstances (as in "Ça, quand même" or "Les applaudissements ne se mangent pas"), but within the circumstances themselves.

-Eleanor Bauer

Jul 18, 2006
emio greco & pieter c.scholten
hell


>
> they find inspiration in Dante's Inferno and in Beethoven 5Th
symphony.....
> hm?????
> After the performance I was confused.
>
> why title was Hell?
>
> If you ask me,the name of the performance, could be "Breakfast",
"Flowers in
> my garden", "party"...I mean...whatever.
>
> I couldn't find a connection with theirs inspiration and with the
final
> product wich was a performance that I saw.
> i coud not find the meaning, the bridge, connection.
>
> THE IDEA.
>
> for me in theatre the content is the most important thing.
> What do you want to say and what do you whant to share with me?
>
> of course -
aesthetic,performing,composition,choreography,technique-but this
> things are just a tool, just an element wherewith you can reach your
idea.
>
>
> The performance begin with potentiality.i thought that it is
introduction of
> the characters which will appear in the second part....
> but...
> in second part there was no characters...only global picture without
any
> personality.
> then...i realized that the first part of the performance was just
like an
> entertainment and this is
> ...i mean...
> this is..
> I really dont like this...and...
> ...i don't need this.
>
> i can say that it was really good dancing parts and amazing building
to a
> gripping climax, the movements push the dancers bodies to extremes,
good
> performing, lightning was good, shifting of the space was very
clear...
> but...
> all these elements were standing there without any idea that will
unit
> them.
>
> this freaks me up-totally
>
> potential was there but nobody used it....it stayed on the surface,
without
> details and without content.
> like a cake without cream.
>
> stage design,light,music...are they support or they are just a
decoration?
>
> it can not be like this
>
> this is not enough for me.
>
> i don°t need fancy costumes and crazy scenography elements, i don't
need
> extraordinary sounds and great light design...
> i want to feel and to reach what they
> (performers,director,choreographer...author...) want to say to me,
how they
> are trying to relate to me,how they approach their ideas....
>
> but...this is my personal opinion and my personal taste
> and...on the end i think that dancers were great and really respect
to
> them...but...i just think that this was a performance with too much
effort
> that on the end did not reach me.
>
>
> jelly
>

Jul 14, 2006
Miguel Gutierrez & The Powerful People
Retrospective Exhibitionist & Difficult Bodies

Strong feelings remain in me after seeing Miguel Gutierres & The Powerful People. I had the opportunity to watch his show already last summer in Russia and I was really curious to see it again. What would my reactions be now considering being in a different place and a different time.


St Petersburg June 2005

I remember a hot worn out theatre which was going to be demolished two days later. The air was as thick as I now experience breathing in Vienna. I had just performed and felt like I was somewhere else. I did not shower, I only wiped off my big painted mouth and my face remained slightly pink.

I remember a stupid character setting the stage dressed only in wig and sneakers. I remember being a bit sceptical. I don't like nakedness, or I don't like it without knowing why it's there. I remember a distressed audience. People were leaving. It was Russia. Live-dubbing himself to an old video, syncronizing his own voice saying stupid things after a show in his former dancer's life. It was well done but boring. Boring for an ordinary audience not understanding english, however relevant to me. I recognised myself bull-shitting in compulsory �gtalk to the dancers�h after performances.

The piece deals with things that goes through my own head. I recognise the questions dealt with in Miguel Gutierrez perspectives on his life with dance . A perfectly executed showcase of dance mixing trademark steps by choreographers that somehow passed him impresses me and scares me. People contain many different personalities. A dancer embodies personalities through a career which transforms them mentally through different places.

Kate Bush singing as if she was on fire – This is my kind of humour and now he had me. Nakedness was suddenly completely ok and the beginning had brought me to a place where I accepted him being naked, where he actually needed to be naked. I didn't need to check his body out again. I could focus at least 80 % on his face. A sad parrot and a nostalgic movie with a promising boy. A simple setting and a naked theme.


Vienna July 2006

I know now what it is and it catches me. It's about life. It's about living with your addiction, a life chosen when being too small to realise what it leads to. The dance-disease gives you a life in motion with constant turbulence of emotions. To sacrifice real things for an abstract living and to sacrifice piece and quiet for an undefind goal. The presence of choice isn't there. The addiction writes it's own history.

In the second part "Difficult Bodies" I am also on an emotional journey. The women are not going to given places in their femininity and I'm fascinated to follow them. The unison steps create one body however they remain very individual. The strange landscape of female frustration almost kills my patience and again timing tests me. The minute before I am about to die they make me leap to a new emotional place. I never thought I could be touched by Destiny's Child, but when the dancers synchronise "I'm a survivor" with perfectly animated expressions, I am completely with them. For me it is about surviving from myself - leaving the always annoying noise in my head of accomplishment behind. The big smiles that grow on their faces make the lack of Beyonce's stylist a relief. This time the song is about that I don't need to be corrected and I don't need to correct myself.

The performance impressed me with its timing – both in the way they perform and also how far the choreography stretches moments. Sometimes keeping me emotionally in an extremely frustrated place. The sad humour within the work allows me space to breathe. It is frustrating and wonderful, as is life.

I see myself in the story revealed on stage and I love the self reflections it brings me. I am confused. I love, but many things and often at the wrong time. I am falling. Because my addiction took me there and I choose to let go this time again. I walk from places perfect towards a fog of imaginations. I do love someone or two or three. But still I need more attention. Addiction.

Charlotta Ruth

Jul 14, 2006
Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People
Retrospective Exhibitionist and Difficult Bodies

I am Miguel Gutierrez. Asi empieza Miguel una retrospectiva sobre si mismo como performer, como "exhibicionista", y hace que el publico repita esta frase con el, y establece , desde el principio, un fuerte contacto con quienes lo acompanamos esa noche. En mi opinion, tal vez lo mas valioso del trabajo de Miguel es precisamente su capacidad de comunicarse poderosamente con el publico.
Y creo que lo consigue porque su trabajo es muy personal, sincero y VIVO...y porque es un show man nato que atrapa, que emociona, que provoca. Su trabajo es sumamente inteligente, pero esta tambien cargado de pasion, del placer de entregarse a impulsos ilogicos...y llevarlos hasta el extremo,de generosidad.

En la obra Miguel se ve a si mismo a traves del tiempo. Y lo que ve, lo exhibe sin pudor a traves de imagenes, de musica,de movimiento.

Muestra imagenes suyas de adolescente, bailando algo parecido una comedia musical escolar, se muestra en una conversacion con el publico despues de alguna funcion en el pasado ...y va imitandose a si mismo.
Me encanta la idea de su propia imitacion (porque ya no es hoy el que era en ese momento!)... Me parece que a veces vernos hacia atras en el tiempo es incomodo, o vergonzoso...Como si nos costara aceptar como hemos sido en el pasado...como si quisieramos creer que fuimos mejores o diferentes...como si lo que somos hoy invalida y supera lo que antes fuimos.Y el tiene el coraje de volver a habitarse en el tiempo y traer aqui, ahora todo lo que ha sido antes, y lo muestra sin reservas...

El trabajo de video en el que se graba a si mismo viendo su propia imagen en la television...reproducida muchas veces es como un tunel sin fin que se convierte en algo comico...y que es una metafora del ser humano en ese estado en el somos al mismo tiempo lo observado, el observador y el acto de observar...y la confrontacion entre estos tres roles , entre estas tres experiencias o perspectivas...la curiosidad del exhibicionista ante si mismo...Miguel se pregunta en su obra cuestiones trascendentales, espirituales y las aborda con irreverencia,con ingenio, con humor.

Miguel construye con su voz una "red" musical que me parecio algo como el soundtrack de una vida , de un reclamo perpetuado, de un vicio o adiccion ...gritando algo como BEAT ME PLEASE! Los primeros sonidos quedan como ecos de nuevos gritos que se van sumando a la pieza y que son mas recientes...y mas vivos, pero los ecos anteriores siguen presentes...en una suplica interminable de atencion?, de castigo?

Uno de los mejores momentos del solo es la explosion de movimiento en donde Miguel baila una virtuosa frase de danza en la que sin categorias ni distinciones, reune indiscriminadamente lenguajes que van del show o las reinas del pop al ballet clasico; del release al jazz...y es increible este bombardeo absurdo de todas sus memorias o "referencias de danza", como lo dice en el programa de mano, donde cita a todos: Madonna, J.Lo, Misha, Tere O'Connor, Jennifer Lacey...es fascinante ver su potencia como bailarin, su versatilidad expresiva y su danza enloquecida y divertidisima...un cuerpo poliglota!

Miguel aborda el aspecto doloroso del exhibicionista: el masoquismo de quien es capaz de soportar lo que sea con tal de seguir en el escenario, para seguir consiguiendo aprobacion, amor?? Y lo hace convirtiendo al publico en su verdugo...Hace pasar varios espectadores a acercarle gradualmente una vela encendida...al culo!, mientras el sigue cantando al limite de sus fuerzas...con la llama de la vela cada vez mas cerca...en una ridicula posicion... en cuatro patas, con las nalgas expuestas al fuego.


Termina su solo empapado en sudor...pero los tecnicos del teatro entran y limpian el escenario y secan el sudor con absoluta indiferencia ante el exhibicionista que se entrego hasta el limite...Pero a nadie le importa, su solo termina...solo. Nadie aprecia lo que el acaba de entregar ahi?

Y entran tres mujeres vestidas de lentejuelas, en un unisono cadencioso y sensual, seduciendo a quien las observa, posando, cautivando...el trio "Difficult Bodies" . Despues se despojan de los brillos para quedar en ropa interior y empezar la "danza frenetica en tres carriles" en la cual avanzan y retroceden incesantemente hacia el publico. Es un unisono obsesivo que convierte los suaves movimientos en gestos desesperados y grotescos ...que dicen : " I am perfect and you will love me and everyone in this room is in this fucking dance". Miguel crea nuevamente la musica de esta pieza manipulando su voz , repitiendo este "mantra" que desenmascara al observado...y al que observa!

Nuevamente, Miguel consigue meternos dentro de esta" fucking" dance: ya sea dando o negando amor a las tres seductoras que intentan hipnotizarnos o reconociendo que nosotros bailamos esa danza tambien, frecuentemente...la danza en la que quisieramos ser perfectos para merecer amor... y ese afan de aparentar perfeccion que solo consigue exponer despiadadamente nuestras miserias...y esclavizarnos.

Las tres mujeres, bailan hasta el extremo del agotamiento y del ridiculo...y del llanto.

Sin embrago...la obra concluye proclamando: AND I DANCE!

A pesar de la tortura, de la indiferencia...de la obsesion, de las privaciones o lo