James Oscar

“Popping Movement with elements of mime, made by flexing the muscles and joints to the beat of the music.…Robot Precise, isolated movements and turns that lock into place before the next movement begins…Rolls or Waves Undulating a part of the body, like an arm or a torso, from one end to the other…Spins Turns down on an isolated body part--head, knees, shoulders--often inverted and initiated by the hands, feet, or torque of the torso….Top Rock An upright form of dancing. Influences include Brooklyn uprocking, tap dance, salsa, lindy hop, Afro-American, Afro-Cuban, and Native American dances….Uprock A "dancing fight" performed with quick, continuous movement…” 

https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Getting+krumped%3A+the+changing+race+of+hip+hop.-a0118675205

“Krump: the part of the story line where the krumper is doing a series of foundations, concepts, materials while in a standing stance position while arms and feet are moving in front of the upper extremities of the body.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krumping

“The urban is not a certain population, a geographic size, or a collection of buildings. Nor is it a node, a transhipment point or a centre of production. It is all of these together, and thus any definition must search for the essential quality of all of these aspects. Henri Lefebvre understands the urban from the phenomenological basis as a Hegelian form. The urban is social centrality, where the many elements and aspects of capitalism intersect in space desire often merely being part of the place for a short time, as is the case with goods or people in transit.”

http://myweb.fsu.edu/jjm09f/1%20Final%20Project%20Materials/lefebvreintro.html#targetText=Lefebvre%20understands%20the%20urban%20from,goods%20or%20people%20in%20transit.

Among an outcrop of microphones (in the dark urban metal vegetal) as though in a post apocalyptic field without the denizen, alone and at the ready to begin a series of tasks, exercises, ritualistic adjustments, and justifications*of body, face, and mind we find 7Starr. At times gliding right into a movement, and at other times gliding right out of the movement, and then at complete other times making and getting into sudden juts and shifts - caught in a rigid stiff crank- all that seems to mimic the urban flow of life. And what precisely is this urban that this so called street dance is working within. The term “urban” and much of its contemporary declinations have come to refer to something ethnic or rather let us say it - “urban” in everyday popular culture parlance  has come to delineate black culture and a google search of urban culture renders the social imaginary of contemporary grafitti. But to be true, are we not all urban and is not everything and all culture that finds itself with the delimitation of the urban grid not also to be considered urban culture? These questionable conflations of race and ethnicity with “the urban” certainly can be understood as byproducts of the social analysis of past intimations of white flight and suburbia and certainly also resultant from the accompanying vision of the stereotypical imaging of black people in the inner cities as sort of barbarian at the gates at the limits of the city and the country.

But alas, any intelligent survey of popular culture would actually reveal the reality of the urban for example in Steve McQueen’s harrowing film Shame starring Michael Fasbender in its ultimate vision of all of many of our contemporary urban lives - all of us (all races) living in  such psychical  darkrooms of the city constantly moving in and from overstimulation to the nothing, and then back to overstimulation to the point of catalytic overkill. Being urban is not about being black and white but really more about those who have chosen to truly live within the dark room cauldron of urban life - those denizen who truly dive into the life of a city - feeling the good, the bad, and the most contemporary of geographical spaces- the city.  But alas, we cannot simply relegate urban experience as some universal experience - for the divide certainly allows and enforces certain segments of the population to create cultures of resistance which krump certainly is an example of. (And of course one must look at the eary intimations of krump in “clowning” as supreme example of an original allegorical urban body practice).

And hence, in this same notion we also have to think that not only is there no race that means urban more than another, but also that all that live within the most contemporary of human spheres (the city) would naturally also all be contemporary citizens. And I will thus say it once and also another time below- these so called street dances such as krumping, breakdance, ticking, blocking etc- these all must must must  be considered under the rubric of contemporary dance- and thus thank god for this collaboration between former Marie Chouinard major dancer and choreographic contributor Lucy May and 7 Starr. We must stop referring to these dances as “urban dance” as though their worth, organization, and complexity were something on a lower brow level. Movement is movement! Contemporary dance is all present forms of contemporary dance!

If the urban as Henri Lefebvre would have us believe can be a space a phenomenological space of exploration -  that the urban  itself can be used to escape the very alienation we naturally ( and not just a place we fall into, but that we can resist from and in) all often fall into, then this 7Starr’s exemplary performance  and its more general practice of krumping could be considered a kind of panorama of all the good, the bad, and the ugly that our bodies subdues (certain kind of bodies- often racialized) and  might fall privy to in the neoliberal urban era. That is that in an era of neoliberal austerity, 7Starr shows us what the body subdues and how it seeks to come out of it, ride with it, implode it (see the terms at the end of this essay to see the vocabulary krumpers use to explain various kinds of implosion of the urban imaginary).

Often relegated to the label of “urban”, such dances ‘like krump’ might at times remain mere curiosities for ‘white’ kids that decide to cross the line and get down with this boogie, and can of course moreover krump  are ritual intra urban battles. What is curious and marvellous here is the involvement and complete consolidation into this craft of former Marie Chouinard dancer and choreographic collaborator Lucy May. Lucy is the kind of dancer’s dancers (easily one of the best dancers of her generation) with the open heart sensibility and very careful awareness of how to enter into Other worlds and how to step into her own world, and moreover Lucy May is the rare type of Western soul who knows how to bridge any divide that has been erected. For, let us say right now especially after watching certain jaw dropping moments of 7Starr’s performance - that this dance and other “urban” dances must no longer be referred to as urban as something distinct from contemporary dance, and that might be the one of the points - that is to show us loud and clear that krup shows us aspects of our contemporaneity, nothing less.  That his and other such dancers have been involved i part of contemporary dance and the language must be changed to understand that this dance is a dance that we all have a stake in as beings living in the emotional geographies of the urban environment. The call and response of the crowd at Lachapelle was finally what we all want to do when we feel the pure affect of such an solidified performance. 

Looking deep into the shift of the manneristic and formalistic (  we first saw an opening shifting of 7 Starr’s eyes that land into a deep reserve of dristi (see yoga)  that will follow us in and out throughout the entire performance- searing/ wedding us to what contemporary art really can mean- that is to say - a rupture with  with and then we see him walking right into it. That is that krump qualifies as “contemporary”, not because it is part of our contemporary time but because as Alain Badiou has spoken of rupture in another context- that which is a contemporary is that which is  a rupture with and in what is accepted as the norm of our times. Krump is obviously a rupture and 7 Starr showed that. As Alain Badiou has said:  contemporary means “new rules, new geometry, new algorithms, new rhythms, new materials” to be used “in the service of new manners of contemplation.” Thankyou 7 Starr for bringiing it!

And in this notion of the walking right into it (bringing it and rupture), we might have many of the complex signifying tropes that line the silver satin (bags) of African American culture. Here we can identify Afro American derived signifying processes like "calls, cries, hollers, riffs, licks, overlapping antiphony" …”demonstrating respect for, goading, or poking fun at a musical style, process, or practice through parody, pastische, implication, indirection, humor, tone- or word-play, the illusions of speech, or narration” (1) , reverence, irreverence. For right into in the urban signifies dropping all equivocation/ hesitation and instead implores us to decisively face the hell wrath dark urban night and the diurnal reliefs with all one’s force and then learning to do it with a smile, a punch, a slide, an invented gesture -and inventing   a whole arsenal to do the such. 7Starr’s krumping virtusostic performance at Lachappelle marvelled as we got an inner view into the very workings of a world that we might not be that far from and that with which we share trying to find allegorical ways to deal with this constant changing weather. (2)

One wonders how often my fellow anthropological geographers (who honour the performative and its subversive possibilities) have considered the tried and true statement that dances like krumping share with phiosopher Henri Lefebvre’s various manifestoes of how to save and how to make the revolution in the urban sphere. If we are to retain something as a way of knowings (knowledge)  from 7Starr’s performance, one might look to a few lessons that can be culled from what this reviewer saw: Be visceral, be fierce. Jump into it, intuit it  (one’ relationship with our everyday relationships to people in the city, the streets and the city’s morphology. Retreat when necessary. Slide but if necessary jerk into the slide. Always have an endless arsenal of faces. Always have an endless arsenal of gestures (gestes infernales). Early strides - know the language. Know the passages (just like other urban body practitioners like those who do parkour). In 7Starr’s visceral twitching, we could see the navigating of the passage through scenes of urban night - the hermetic, mystical, the good, the bad, the ugly, and the mystical.

Lucy May’s choreographic acumen did not so much elevate a dance which needs no elevation but rather her choreographic skills added the layer of exposure (the anima of the darkroom) so we could see, breathe in the theatre , and also experience as though we might be witness to a real battle.

And after considering it all, what might stand out Is that if our present era of social media, “likes”, “ghostings”, and the surveillance that comes with the lot have become part of what Debord referred to as the spectacle, we may well have now entered into an era whose ‘economy of signs’ and hopefully always counter-signs of proliferating affect being thrown at us at each and very turn. And if we then accept this, would there not be a need for urban practices that also “deal in affect”. Dance, more than any other kind of urban body practices might be one option to answer this call, and although practices like parkour or other forms of street dance might also pull heavily on making our affect explicit, is it not possible that with a practice like krumping, we are dealing with a urban body practice that seems close to being a world of pure affect, This is what is certainly sowed- an intense practice whose exhaustion and endurance might be physical giving, but  whose backdrop are lightning bolts of pure affect that come popping out and inside of anyone who dares to take the challenge of krump. What we have is essentially pure affect in the contemporary life of krump!

Battle: when krumpers face off in a direct dance competition where the use of Concepts, Materials, combos, and Get off takes in place

Biter: someone who attends sessions or watches battles in order to feed on others' styles and originality so that they can mimic those moves later at another battle and use them off as coming from their own inventiveness i.e. plagiarism.

Session: when a group of Krumpers form a semi-circle, or cypher in hip-hop context, and one-by-one go into the middle and freestyle.

Buck: an adjective used to describe someone who excels in Krump. it is also used to describe one's movement to be different or out of the Foundations making it worthy for the eyes.

Live: an adjective used to describe someone raising the energy in the session or battle.

Call-Out: when a Krumper initiates/requests a battle with another Krumper by calling them out.

Lab: when Krumpers get together or by themselves create new concepts and/or advancing their style.

Get-Off: when a Krumper performs a set of movements that determines that a Krumper's round is over, Usually is determined by seeing the krumper doing nothing but foundations, bang outs, or arm-swings.

Kill-Off: when a Krumper performs a set of movements that excites the crowd to the point where the battle is over and the crowd surrounds the Krumper; the opponent is "killed off."[15]

Krumper: A dancer who specializes in the Art of Krump.

Krumpography: Krump used as a choreography.

Concepts: An abstract movement that helps Krumpers tell a story.

Material: A material movement Krumpers use to show a random item to further story telling. (i.e. pouring water on the ground and slipping.)

Jabs: short, sharp, staccato movements when the arms extend from the chest outwards and with the same energy pulling it back.

Stomps: Stomping the foot to the ground in a way that the Krumpers are getting their energy from the ground itself.

Chest pop: Making an upward motion with the chest the same manner as breathing into the lungs; Krumpers usually do Chest pops for breathing in air while in a session or in a round.

Arm Swing: Moving an arm in a swinging motion. There are two types of arm swing, Small arm swing and Big arm Swing; Small arm swings are like throwing a baseball kind of motion while Big arm swings are like using the whole arm as the bat.

Praise Krump: The art of Krump to religious songs; way of praising for krumpers through Krump.[16]

Story Line: a set of Combos performed by Krumpers to build up the Hype and the Spazz Meter to get to a moment to get off or kill off their opponent.

Hype: The intense feeling of being swept away; usually if a Krumper does something buck or different or kills the music, the crowd is hyped up thus leading to a kill-off. Common Krump audience would think that the Hype comes from the Krumper doing his rounds but Krumpers also get their Hype and boost their Spazz Meter from the crowd.

Spazz Meter: a term used to determine the level or extent of the Hype.

Buck Talk: The act of trash talking while in a Krump Battle.

Atmosphere: feeling the vibe of the environment and having the environment feel you presence.

Intro: starting one's rounds; usually with small movements, sometimes used to introduce a Krumper's character or concept.

Rounds: The round of a Krumper where he/she uses a combination of Combo's, Materials, Concepts, Foundations.

Buckness: the part of the story line where the krumper is already Hyped up with his rounds, showing a series of Heavy or fast, or heavy and fast movements; usually done with a stance with 2 knees slightly bent while arms and feet are moving in front of the lower extremities of the body.

Krump: the part of the story line where the krumper is doing a series of foundations, concepts, materials while in a standing stance position while arms and feet are moving in front of the upper extremities of the body.

Liveness: the part of the story line where the krumper is doing a series of foundations, concepts, materials while body is in a bent up position while arms and feet are moving outside of the body, may it be upwards or side-wards.

Get-off: The part of the story line where the Krumper is getting off with the feelings contained, letting out by showing repetitive movements like bang outs, jabs, redundancy, and alike.

Kill-Off: when a Krumper performs a set of movements that excites the crowd to the point where the battle is over and the crowd surrounds the Krumper; the opponent is "killed off."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krumping

(1) Gena Dagel Caponi, Signifyin(G), Sanctifyin', & Slam Dunking: A Reader in African American Expressive Culture. University of Massachusetts Press, 1999, p. 141.

(2) In Christina Sharpe’s book, “In the Wake”, the weather refers to the afterlives of slavery and certainly in krumping having been created by the descendants of African American slaves, we have a form of practice to “work with” first particular legacies, but also in a larger sense to address the larger issue of colonisation of today’s everyday life that a philosopher like Habermas has spoken of. Christina Sharpe’s work is one of the guiding contemporary forces of contemporary African American thinking.

Question James Oscar : Your work often  seems to be interested on some interior line that people have inside,  “des liens”- links. In the stuff we were doing in the rehearsals with Fluid Grounds, you seem very interested in this interior line people have inside them perhaps, but also the lines between us- des liens.  How are we to understand all this work you do with links and lines  -“des liens”.Why would this be important to address in your work?

Benoît Lachambre: Pour moi c’est presque plus que important. On vie dans une époque où tous les liens on était brisé (For me this is almost more important. We live in an era where all the links have been broken) . A lot of severed links.  (Starts in English) For me it is about rediscovering the potential of the body to link up. The potential of the body to link up, to be aware of the different links that in an environment and how the body serves as a sensor to link with everything -that we can sense each other and that the space is body, so for me. The rational concept of divided as/ is a very old patriarchal concept. It feels like we really need to question this. It seems like a necessity to question all these divisions and to start working on the relations , relating you know. And I think  I am making a reference to the expression “all my relations”, a  First Nations expression and I am informed by that term- and I am seeing that in my practice - it suggests that I might could see “all my relations” as all the ways I can relate- I could see “all the ways relation if possible -a relating of all the times of relation there can be, to explore all the relations that have been and can be. Not just ancestral relations but but the “relation” in itself so I think for me it’s extremely important to be considered being in relation with and to see how…for me it really is a school- how my body from early childhood to divide we are taught to divide.  

Question James: So we are taught to divide. So you are saying your work is about teaching people to re-link themselves? Relink with each other? Why is it important in that sense?

Benoît:: My work teaching oneself, teaching each other to relink because we are constantly. We have learnt to create division and constantly have to work on letting go and (remembering) there is body as relation. And for me that is very very important and it signifies a lot. It is something I find has a social and human environment implication to do that but it is not what my body has learnt. It (my body) has learnt form a system that has nourished a lot of division in everything- it has nourished this division in the sense of the body in relation to itself, it has nourished this division in the relation of the body to its environment at all the levels. 

Question James: Donc il faut qu’on travail les liens?

Benoît: Il faut qu’on travail les liens parce que (we have to work through our links) if we want the species to continue, il  faut changer notre rapport (we have to change our relationship to being)  à l’être et a la vie. Il faut commencer a modifié et c’est tout un processus parce que (we have to modify this and this all a process ) / at the same time I’m doing for many years but still feel like I know very little. I am still stuck in patterns of division with everything including my body so that I have to reteach myself and the is why I teach it because I realize every time I go back in it (go back at it) , I realize it exists. For me it is a constant reminder. I think that. This is what I have been taught -  separation at so many levels and it seems like there is no survival in that mode, we need it, we don’t have a choice . 

Question James: Do you feel we need to link up again? Do you feel we are a point where we do not have a choice?

Benoît: There needs to be a shift and it demands a lot of change and a lot of our constructs  don’t want to change so we have to work on softening the constructs so that it can start thinking and operating differently and building other values that are present very much in our DNA for hundreds of thousands of years or relations that are actually still in us. That we have to work on to recall all that. So for me that is what…

The matter of tape as a material. The stick tape is very much like skin. It stretches, it is like body tissues and when it is put on the ground making circles and all, it creates different polarities. The tape creates different strengths and I like to soften my body awareness so I can feel / everything vibrates everything vibrating- and when you create meaning in space, it vibrates differently and it calls in - this thing what is it calling for and I can’t put words on it  but it can reveal itself to me [accessing the anthropomorphism of objects,  a banal object become radiant with some sort of animist energy, accessing not so much energy but a synergy in all things] if I give room to it and soften (myself towards it) , it starts to make sense on an intuitive level, on an instinctive level, it starts to create knowledge. It proposes something. So for me, it is important to start working in those directions where I am listening differently to what is happening and it is the idea with the tape of cumulative knowledge because everyday we make a whole tracing (tracé) and it may last a few days, then we take it out and the pile it up in tiny tight balls of tape, it this accumulation of knowledge in a little ball. It’s a little like the knowledge in your DNA, compressed in very very tiny things and there is a lot of knowledge in there and so I am questioning the kind of knowledge which is intuitive and instinctive that creates itself and calls on different possibilities and we can be in link with it . So for me it is a way to do visual art and a way to do linkage at the same time. So I am looking for in practices for that- what are the ways I can link with and to work on instinctive  memories, inhabiting, a lot of shining so I often work with the energetic like working with magnetic fields because when you start practicing on movement that is particularly similar to the movement of a magnetic field , you can ove this notion through the body of space in architectural ways and that is linkage and it is malleable almost like it was ur like almost like it was vegetal memories and vegetal knowledge and it has very very high speed in all directions in all forms towards and from whatever we relate to, and it has a lot of knowledge, but it is instinctive knowledge, not necessarily written knowledge (instinctive knowledge that we have lost ? So people have lost this instinct How can dance offer that - that is main question - like with lifeguard, you brought people in - how can dance help  people to soften the constructs, to operate differently to build values , meanings in space to create knowledge to be more instinctive - how does dance do that. Dance has been removed from its origin. I think dance has become the product in its function. Dance as a function is to be in relation - that is what I feel, what my body feels.

Question James: So for you dance form our conversations dance has become a product in stead of having a sense of  relating.

Benoît:: it becomes a product of presenting it just as a work instead of operating  a relation, the empathetic function of dance. There is a technique done by a modernist Alwin Nikolais & Murray Louis. They did a technique very much based in form, volume, space, time, speed and I was exposed to hat really early in 1979/ 1980. But what they were doing was still very much a presentational/ aestheticized  form of dance. I am very interested by the concepts that they brought, that they related to, but to take it out of the theatrical construct and away from the dance practices as they have been. Dance became a product because of some economical and political reasons and it stopped being a necessity for the same reasons it got taken away from necessity for the same reasons (let us say) and I find I want to see the necessity . When I was young adult , I wanted to see dance go back to necessity and that is a very old thing I have felt - that dance will be great when everybody sees it as a necessity.

Question James:You mean like people going dancing to the nightclub? All these kids are going out raving and spending money for raving? It is about their bodies, so in a way we are going back there- to dance as a necessity. 

Benoît:: Not to be judgemental, but still it is still an economical thing, maybe eventually if the dance gets back in the body, people will start living it in the everyday as an active thing does not manifest as an economical structure but which starts to inform and form  an economical structure so it starts to change the way we think about life and environment . What we live with. How we live? The construction of furniture how everything is square and standardized but the body -instead of always  putting the body in the standard- maybe we can shift the function of the body and question “what is the standard doing “. Is the “standard” creating the same function -  it is making a product and the same product limits the body’s perception because if we accept it as s standard  and that it is the most efficient way of seeing life a lot of stuff of boundaries start to be created in the nature of product because all the products are created with very standardized ideas .  

Question James: So it’s  about the standardization that is going on. It comes down to us being in a standardized world. How can we learn to deconstruct that standardization so we can start to see things differently and look at necessities differently. So if we need to get inside again. You always use this word “couches” (“layers”) (en français) to describe how to fight this standardization . So you have the standardization and you are interested in dance getting back to its necessity. And the form you are using the the somatic form. Can you speak about that . I quote you from our last interview- “Dans le travail somatique, ce qui ressort justement, c'est le relationnel – c'est comment le temps est toujours en relation soit avec une autre personne, soit avec les liens spatiaux;  le corps est constamment en lien. Donc c'est dans ce lien-là, du moins ce qui m'intéresse dans ce travail somatique, c'est dans ce lien-là que ça existe le plus qu’il y a le plus de mobilité et de danse. “

Benoît:: Well by elaborating the idea of sensation. In a a very very materialistic  way, just look at the layers of fascia in the body. If you touch the inner surface of the mouth, you see it is malleable. The consciousness of that surface can really like once you start to be conscious of the many layers of the surface you can surpass with consciousness the different layers and you can begin to work in the different layers - there is a lot of complex movement there - il y’a des couches (en français) (in English -“ there are layers")  . There is a construct we make of ourselves , the a cheek and then there is flesh and in the degrees of conscious, there is an awareness of the lack of seeing the potential of the multiples directions that are contained and possible in the body Perceiving all this different layers of direction It questions our different notions of real.The notions of real are based on arrested consciousness on the same thing as the standardization like for instance “an arm is an arm and it bends like this” but actually there is a lot more direction in an arm than in the direction we work with it in the gym (multiplicity)  in which we work with it . There are so many extreme (with so many ) complex flows in the body surface- inside and outside and all that is relation. So then it is exponential, the amount of knowledge of relation that can be developed in all directions, all forms, and a lot of multiple different dynamics . 

Just by sensing alone and questioning the layers of knowledge and the recognition of what is happening . Just that is offering millions of possibilities than can be extremely creative - very mobile knowledge and architecture than can really find self constantly and establish links between the inside and the outside. So right there , there is exponential possibilities and that alone- what the standardization does is that it closes that knowledge . It limits the knowledge to some very very Cartesian. And then we are stuck … it happens a lot -  constantly trying to undo that in my work  an to propose exercises and ways to look at a more multiple , multiverse of  existence. So then the notion of reality and time  shifts because all our reality  shifts because time and space is based on high Cartesian rational  standardized knowledge so then it has to and then the work or exercise  that is to be created is totally explosive and the knowledge is like where am I? We have to start looking  ok at - there is that one possibility where I can connect, and from that one possibility of sensorial connection of a volume and in it the volume is more mobile and it can actually shift between the level of self awareness , awareness of contact, and reach to the outside in / and  yielding from outside to inside , outside to inside  (so accessing new knowledge maybe) new knowledge, new dynamics of communication.  I mean it is not that new. In fact it is ancient knowledge and communication - alert erased by standardization but a lot of cultures still have that - but that is the question - how can we inform contemporary art and contemporary values with those questions. How can we question those things so we can start looking at - is the human only a replica of standardization or can we start to ask questions about what is being replicated.  There are lot more questions out there- all of this is to come- it is so vast. 

Question: James 

So you have your spectator. The last time you spoke about the “mobility of the spectator”. Can you talk about the spectator in your work. C’est quoi les attendus du spectateur?

Benoît: By doing the practice, I am suggesting another act of spectatorship and that is what we practice to ho can we involve in space time and relation so that it starts to suggest something else because everyone has this knowledge but we all repress it at different levels so once we all come in together, we all have this same potential . We all have potential to recognize stuff. It depends. It feels like I am trying to set up a  space that allows people this fascination of form and colour and energy and shape and mobile So there is the proposition of the gaze of the spectator in Fluid Ground, and we take photos of the spectator in the piece we are working on now and to look at it through - to look at it like a reflected surface and there is a surface and  reflection and  in the surface is the reality of what it reflects,  I have a fiction . There are a lot of possibilities - not just one way

James Question: So you can advance your practice by looking at the gaze of the spectator?

Benoît::  Yes, proposing that reflection is creating a dialogue between fiction and reality and if we work on my hand moving towards something else, there is some presence of - it looks like my hand wants to touch this glass - but I will work on what . Inside the reflection there’s all kinds of stuff happening, and what is happening there, I can work with that reflection and propose if someone takes a picture of one reality, and the way it relicts and proposes another reality , the coexistence between both, then there is - like a take a photo and I see different things happening . I see it weird and then I interact with it. So there again it creates a kind of universal reflection and so in that way, the spectator for me- not everyone is going to go that way- some like to sit and just watch from a distant viewpoint  and that is the construct of what a spectator does. What we are doing can also serve that spectator who follows the construct of being immobile. But it proposes multiple ways of perceiving so in this way, people can see it for themselves  and have their own creativity in the looking and perceiving  and approaching . Although there are rules that we establish in our practice. We work with the tape in a very specific way, very obsessive. When I work with the tape, I really work with my obsessions because it all has to be - the quality of tape is that it can do very clean lines and it has to make a very interesting tracés through space . But many things can be done with it. Maybe in later work, I will work with more tape. In this work, with the elasticity of tape and its potential to make very clear drawings and how light strikes it (the tape) and it is very very beautiful the different ways  a dark blue seen from a different angle becomes black and then it becomes silvery so there I a shift of reading that keeps happenning . 

James: I am seeing some recurring motifs in your work. In Snakechamber , you have the womb, with Culberg Ballet, there are strings hanging for the ceiling. And here you have the lines on the floor in Fluid Grounds. Recurring motifs of lines, vectors. Also in Prismes, vectors, neon lines. 

Benoît:: In Prismes, it has to do with the work of the retina and how we perceive complementary colours - hyper-visual , the idea of texture and skin , getting the texture, the layers of visibility of this material that creates layers of visibility, layers of visibility and sensorial tactile . Hyper-sensorial and strong dreamy like the dancer Gazina and her long wig. It makes a curve and then the lines- but also it is undulates, it captures a vibration,  so there is a lot of possible fluctuations that can be seen within the observation of very sensitive material that actually undulates and vibrates . When you walk by it the traces on the floor (in Fluid Grounds), you can feel the vibration so we are working a lot on sensing how things vibrate and also sense of touch , heat, vibration , sound . So we’re constantly recognizing vibrations of things . Vibrating and bouncing back and that again, it proposes another way to perceive the world sculpturally. 

Question James : What for you is the relationship of community to the individual in your work, like in Lugares Communes?

Benoît:: Looking at how we can use each other ’s shining and live with that and the potential becomes much stronger - it becomes very rich. we had fantastic experience of seeing people’s aura experience of tan in that piece amazing visions just by the work of the practice- just by the  practice of the work, we started seeing / sensing things (oh yeah we can)   and by all going there, we started to have different dialogues with each other and different ways of living as a community but dancing with each other’s presence instead of dancing in a separate notion of people dancing 42  in space - we are all singular but it is with that singularity that we can / could actually communicate and then the space is a vector so it creates a different kind of - sense of community  - community as a place of multiple vectors then it creates loud containers - used as containers, the space as containers, our movement through each other as shifting notions of time and space so then there is is it no longer the Cartesian look on life It is hitting that s that we can learn to live differently as communities and how we can - how we can get rid of all those vert strong barriers- ways to let go of and it is is fascinating because it is so alive - this life that becomes bigger than us but it becomes a huge thing . 

Question James:  And I see  have you switched back from the “Italienne scenography”.

Benoît: L’Italienne est construite - le rôle du spectateur est très fixe et ce rôle du spectateur oblige encore un fois une standardisation de son corps immense . On ne réussit rarement à garder un enfant assis pendant une heure. L’enfant, il vit dans tous les sens l’enfant pi c’est ça m’intéresse comment je peux encourager les gens de vivre dans tous les sens. So then the dynamic of the spectator and the sector’s perception and their “disposition corporelle” - how they place themselves in space in relation with other people , that becomes for me also choreography , an unwritten choreography. That for me is a very very powerful element and it is a kind of social community choreography that I think is brilliant because it is created by shifting presences and for me that is one point of choreography that now I am really really  fond of. It feels so good to see this!

(This interview was originally done with the kind permission of B.Leux Contemporary Dance for a project with Art Circulation, and is published in English original in this non-profit private blog/ platform belonging to to James Oscar. All use of material must be consulted via these parties.) 

Photos Veronique Soucy

For within the ripped hole (félure) dug into the mattress with a knife, Jassem Hindi makes, is a whole life but also histories, fragments but not a portal passageway- the hole is a one way trip- that is where we are right now. That is where the situation of first nation’s population is right now- caught inside a neoliberal pleasure and pain machine - making promises while hashing out more blood, and oil.

"The horizon of the infinite" is no longer the horizon of the whole, but the "whole" (all that is) as put on hold everywhere, pushed to the outside just as much as it is pushed back inside the "self." It is no longer a line that is drawn, or a line that will be drawn, which orients or gathers the meaning of a course of progress or navigation. It is the opening [la brèche] or distancing [lecarte- ment] of horizon itself, and in the opening: us. We happen as the  opening itself, the dangerous fault line of a rupture. “ Jean Luc Nancy

Windigo features Jassem Hindi of Murder Dance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zKx7PMdggU- . Murder Dance with its no-faced, clown-faced predator - dancer - actors setting up a stage filled with flowers and random garbage. A stage or meadow as it is referred to that the no-faced, clown-faced predator - dancer - actors jaunt in, prance along the edges of,  and slow dance in with audience members. This all along the detritus filled stage of flowers and garbage with the overwrought poesis of Pierre Guyotat’s masterpiece Eden, Eden, Eden (1) (as far as this reviewer could observe),  all the while getting drunk and tracing contemporary dance’s lines through the three clown faced/ no faced predator’s bodies digging deeper and deeper into a post industrial meadow. Windigo features Montreal’s Beckettian extrovert Peter James. Windigo features its choreographer Lara Kramer of Native Girl Syndrome. Windigo like Hindi’s Murder Dance constitutes a space within which we are invited to enter into and ruminate - no matter how brutal the assault we witness, no matter now much the disquiet wrenches our souls. But Kramer has created a nice balance of both abstraction, pure laughter, and the an affectionate yet tacit love between the characters of the two dancer actors- Peter James and Jassem Hindi. For their love if what they have to move them through the challenges of this both chthonic (Windigo) and real specific realm (contemporary Canada’s neoliberal cold shoulder- joy-oblivion in the winter wonderland).  For the thinker David Harvey (2007) both that chthonic helm of the creature Windigo and neoliberalism might just share some affinities.

Kramer’s Windigo features three to four mattresses on stage. Two in our main foreground. Kramer huddles with her dancer/ actors for a long while, while the audience take their seats. She spends a considerable amount of time speaking to Peter James and Jassem Hindi. There is a great amount of care in getting her actors ready to enter into this theatrical realm - this was heartfelt and immediately effective as her actors immediately assumed a depth of corporality vis a vis the piece as soon as she walked away. The rule of director, always the mid wife in many ways - to this elusive monster that hopefully can communicate some of the director’s intention and beyond that.

The piece begins with Kramer adjourning from the stage pep talk and warming,  to her being a  DJ guide on the side - becoming a sort of mainstay curator of the sound of what is to happen. The sounds throughout will be children’s voices speaking about variegate subjects and even at times some direct references (at least one very direct reference to the nation’s native missing women and a direct reference to very undramatic talk about a shooting someone has just witnessed). The sounds are spaced out around  as a kind of counterpoint to the actions on stage.

The first sounds are that of a kind of hearth- that is of a kindling fire  crackling. The sounds match the two dancer actors - Jassem and Hindi who become familiar with every contour of their respective mattresses settling deep into these mattresses in a deep bodied sleep. One notices an immediate change in the usual extrovert Peter James in his immediate deep embeddedness into the mattress. It is immediately clear that we will be in for an affecting and very deep prolepsis - that is he immediately assumes a role that had been going on - an occurrence  a life that had already been deep in such a slumber and deeply fixed into this mattress. What is this life? Why is this life? And here is where this reviewer feels there is not a need for outright talk about native bodies or about missing and endangered native women. For we are in this form the start- we can see this form the start- we already are inside this interior landscape of deep disquiet, of deeply affecting dis-adjustments, of discomfit, and of two general (yet specific) lives living on the threadbare ripping lines of malaise. We see and feel this. Peter’s slumber deep into the mattress recalled the famous occurrence of the “tollund man” that the poet Seamus Heaney:

Some day I will go to Aarhus

To see his peat-brown head,

The mild pods of his eye-lids,

His pointed skin cap.

In the flat country near by

Where they dug him out,

His last gruel of winter seeds

Caked in his stomach,

Naked except for

The cap, noose and girdle,

I will stand a long time.

Bridegroom to the goddess…

The tollund man is “s a naturally mummified corpse of a man who lived during the 4th century BC, during the period characterised in Scandinavia as the Pre-Roman Iron Age.[1] He was found in 1950 on the Jutland peninsula in Denmark, buried in a peat bog which preserved his body known as a bog body.[ The man's physical features were so well-preserved that he was mistaken at the time of discovery for a recent murder victim.[ Twelve years before Tollund Man's discovery, another bog body, Elling Woman, had been found in the same bog.”

At first, the allusion to the tollund man presented here by this reviewer was to the affecting embeddness that Windigo begins with, but then as can bee seen in this coincidental parallel, the original body tollund man’s gravesite had been later found  to have another bog body- - the Elling Woman, found in the same bog. And it is thus here in this kind of primordial state of being of a primordial couple, not like the Lovers of Valdaro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lovers_of_Valdaro 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tollund_Man, in their eternal love embrace, but rather in the immortal companionship (by circumstance) of these two immortal bodies - found in this bog and found in the geopolitical matrix/ stage of Lara Kramer’s Windigo. Kramer’s companions recall Athol Fugard’s “couple”- Boes and Lena, and bien sûr, the timeless renditions of companionship  and “couples” that dot Beckett’s landscapes (Endgame, Godot etc).

In this first scene of the bodies becoming embedded into the mattress, we have both finding a rare moment of quiet amongst the rest of their quiet disquiet of some kind of displacement or other unfortunate circumstance these two characters have found themselves in, fending for their existence. And to this reviewer’s mind, it is this universal (but without negating the particular reference to the first nations’ precarious status even within  Canadian moment of “reconciliation” notion of feeling outside, of living outside, of being made to be outside that is key here. To identify with a spectator and bring spectator in, it might be necessary to present some aspect of a universal condition of displacement on the stage such that an identification can occur and hence lad towards the beginnings of some forms of understanding and exchange.

Kramer  successfully achieves such an identification in presenting this haunting “phantom set of still” (words describing a present installation that she has up during the FTA): http://fta.ca/en/show/phantom-stills-and-vibrations/, but of course the question might be how much do we learn about this particular condition she wants to evoke and how much do we have to learn. For presenting this haunting set of bodily gestures, “living situations”, and continuous discomfits certainly does give us the picture.

The actors roll deep into the mattress and ultimately withdraw knives that they slowly begin to use as tools to open up their mattresses and stuff them and with various living serving materials, (they are tasked with this duty)  add rope to the ends of the mattress and make them survival vehicles, and rip into them opening up wounds that become glaring holes into which spectators can glare and see the overstuffed, the bloating, the bare and raw lives that seek to find a few moments of respite amongst the detritus filled stage. Peter finds himself under the mattress hiding and assuming, handling  it all at once. The mattresses again the look of a kind of flotilla Espace Libre’s three arches on the wall  as the backdrop and Kramer’s simple soft lighting create a very subtle chiaroscuro with which we can properly consider these lives not as glaring examples but as everyday examples that we see out and about trying to find a way, trying to be recognized. But ultimately the triumph of Kramers piece is the self identification and non need for recognition (à la Charles Taylor) that occurs. For ultimately even amongst the unacceptable (to our mind) living conditions that these two fragile souls are caught in (is one of the dancer actors more fragile than the other/ is one more protector and the other more a sensitive soul) become dwelling places (Heidegger) that can be arranged for moments of joy and rapture, even considering the circumstances. Naming the such resilience can become stereotypical and a kind of quasi governmental language that seeks to save those in need who are always said to have “resilient lives”. Their is a narrative around resilience that can become dangerous installing a trajectory that “all” can go through moving “from hardship to victory”. This Disneyesque type of narrative forgets the dizzying moments of fragmentation and the moments of the sublime- impossible. It is in the sublime impossible that choreographers like Lara Kramer can offer spectators viewers a view beyond how Others (natives) live and have lived. The sublime impossible (as we do see at times in Windigo ) is about being inside of moments (that is regaining a notion of self- time no matter what one goes through but not simply relegating it to the past), being nourished by these historical schemas and building larger scaffoldings of existences from them, and ultimately the sublime- impossible is not so much bout history and being resilient but moreover about realizing life- realizing and living inside of the rawness of life- moving in and through each circumstance as the Jassem Hindi and Peter James do on stage.

One of the most memorable instances of the piece occurs after Jassem Hindi has opened up his mattress to have an almost oval opening. He props the mattress upright and he stuffs all his materials  and clothes inside of the mattress. The opening begins to attain the look of a sore and an identification with the cuts-outs of Gordon Matta Clark photographed by Alvin Baltrop https://www.we-heart.com/2014/01/13/alvin-baltrop-and-gordon-matta-clark-the-piers-from-here/

 For within the ripped hole (félure) dug into the mattress with a knife, Jassem Hindi makes, is a whole life but also histories, fragments but not a portal passageway- the hole is a one way trip- that is where we are right now. That is where the situation of first nation’s population is right now- caught inside a neoliberal pleasure and pain machine - making promises while hashing out more blood and oil. Jassem’s solo dance with the mattress registers as one of the best sequences in dance in the Montreal scene this year. Jassem is at once torero, psychotic flaunter, flaunting his visual creation (the “mattress painting sculpture”)  in what amounts to being a bright-dance, regal-dance, suffer-dance, jaunt dance, light dance, challenge dance. Hindi pulls the top attached to the upright mattress with its gaping hole of stuffed clothes and he twists falls into it away from it, he shocks his straightened out legs, fall and twist countercheck wise, clock wise into a general epileptic fit, and then he arises to do it all again- twist, turn into it, holding the rope like it is an object to be tamed, then looking at it again stepping away all while holding the cord and then again falling into it, out of it, and ultimately falling hard and hard to the ground. It is an astounding piece of choreography and dance- both terrorizing , frightening, and a pleasure to watch all at once. This solo at first enchants and then really sets the viewer into a very uncomfortable panic. All the while Peter James who has achieved total mastery in his counterpoint role; while Jassem Hindi does this insane dance jutting solo dance with the mattress and then permanently enters the hole (félure), inserts himself into the sore (félure) of the upright mattress  he has dug into it and becoming part of its interior, while Peter James takes hold of a  strange teddy rabbit which he starts slowly moving up and and down while holding just its head.

The teddy rabbit, as it were has a springy mid section which allows it to not just spring but elasticize every time he pushes it in a downwards motion. The mid section is almost skeletal but not quite. Between Peter James complete mastery of just this move as begins to make a complete circle around the stage’s periphery (and slowly walking by Jassem Hindi who is now inserted completely into the mattress that is pushed upright against the wall). Peter James minutiae of each and every moment is such an incredible controlled instance of anti- theatralization that he first became known for. Each decrepit step while slowly letting the teddy rabbit go up and down in its’ springy pink fashion allows a counterpoint to his walking which doe snot seem theatrical, solemn, or some sad pain, but rather which feels like a walk of rumination. The kind of walk that for instance the the present Canadian liberal government might do well in taking. It would be a treat to see Justin Trudeau with a pink teddy rabbit walking slowly in almost butoh style like Peter James but alas it is the silence that impregnates this scene and we know our dear Prime Minister would never be able to shut his mouth for the length of this scene. James makes his way past us and we are help captive by his slow walk because we do not know what to make of it. We ask ourselves - what are we watching, where is this all going- and the answer is nowhere - just as the situation Lara Kramer seeks to enunciate using a poetic of joy-oblivion with an ethics and look of an impossible sublime.

Beyond being a Sisyphean rock walk, Peter James embodies that dead stare that the Canadian nation has come to make as regards the spectral imperial “past” and of the ghostly first nation’s “present”. Kramer’s Windigo might ask- do we simply remain voyeurs to this non stop historical erasure- where does it start and stop. Or as this reviewer has put it in his own work ,

As if the whole landings were Left lilt, as though a barren shack had some real despondency of Concern, and all swelled ‘they’ all Move in this slow, rhythmic gaze to avoid this edge but at its limit line or this uncertain edge, we see it as distance, as a remote as something some removes away from whatever could be our concern we sit and swell or rather walk by seeing the swell in what seems the distance, this decrepit, we walk relieved to be in this uncertain real, assured it is not the artifice of concern, but rather debris, detritus, singlets of remnants which stalk at their and our possible.Once removed, we stalk by, the eyes bulge, the shabby coat or rather rubbish, stalking ,as though it were all some Concern.

Further embedded in the mattress, Hindi finally emerging but only to first become half man/ half apparatus, the teddy rabbit of Peter James’ performance entering into a hypnotic anthropomorphization before our eyes, both building a fortress of mattresses and protecting each other, the witnesses of toy animals accompanying them, tight holdings between the two and rocking together, Peter James eerily wrapping their plastic toy animal guardians in transparent cellophane looking suffocated - des vies éteintes….the long stare of both of these voyagers on this long long long road….

(1) “RIMA squad clambering into trucks, falling onto women, guns at sides, hardened members spurring violet rags clasped between women's thighs ; soldier, chest crushing baby sucking at breast, parting woman's hair pushed over eyes, stroking forehead with fingers covered in powdered onyx ; orgasm spurting saliva from mouth, dowsing baby's buttered scalp ; retracted member resting softening on shawls soaking up dye ; wind shaking trucks, sand whipping …against axles, sheet-metal…” Pierre Guyotat 1995, Eden, Eden, Eden, 1995

The way we perceive is often taken for granted and as a reviewer of art, for the most part we often work from one position or sets of positions that might change with slight increments due to personal circumstance, accumulation of personal history, knowledge, and experience. To be true, really augmenting or diminishing that to an umpteenth degree might be considered only through apparatus like VR or as some of the great poets and artists like Samuel Coleridge Taylor on opium or perhaps the great historical hi jinx of Witkiewicz with his famous experiments taking photographs on different substances and states of being: 

https://www.moma.org/interactives/objectphoto/assets/essays/Szymanowicz.pdf

A recent experience in a dance theatre piece has brought up this way of perceiving and the real importance of continually challenging the seat from which we consider performance and or any art for that matter.  With the flu season in somewhat of a rebound right now, this reviewer found himself taking some cold medicines whose combinatory effects were so potent hallucinatory experience, that led to a different but well worth considering  way of perceiving of Gabino Rodríguez’s  Tijuana. 

Tijuana, for anyone over 40 years old who has spent time in the United States has a little bit of a different connotation than what it might right now. Tijuana just like most neologistic place names like say Trieste back that is Tijuana in the 1980s was impregnated with a certain mystique. It had a kind of Breaking Bad mystique, I guess one could say.  Oe would go to Tijuana to shop, or to get a cheap dentist or to escape as s fugitive from justice. . Tijuana was essentially impregnated with the notion of a frontier town which it very well is. Made famous by Hunter S Thompson and with the feel of William S Burroughs’s notion of an interzone, Tijuana in my childhood had the feel of something interstitial. That is that yes one could get robbed in Tijuana or maybe someone might every once in a while disappear, but Tijuana certain did not have the feel of a necropolis like the present day spotlit new frontier city Juarez with it’s drug cartel haze filled murder “territoire”. Tijuana had a fun flair, button as in Rodriguez’s portrayal, the loss of innocence makes it a kind of territory of flat affect. And yes, this is the feeling of Rodriguez’s Tijuana. 

It is here that Gabino Rodríguez starts his documentary theatre inquiry into a raw life in Tijuana and this viewer’s own views of the piece were amplified and distorted  at once, to then give a less detailed but more  visually symbolic view of the staging. For under the effects of a flu and with its accompanying medicines, what became pronounced was not so much the sequence and actual whole trajectory but rather the placement and what came to be almost hallucinatory amplifications of the few minimalist props put on the stage. For after this flu induced viewing of the piece it is the architectural dramaturgy and the various aspects of the almost collage type of environment ? A screen with video details of a man’s life, the actual man on stage, his beers,  a 3d painting of a highway on which the man may be walking, a huge industrial stainless steel fan, some bricks set up to look like a city, a fern.

First a man - that is the subject whose raw life he will portray-  with his back turned to the audience for quiet a while.  Gabino Rodríguez still back turned, his body is hunched and there is already the sense of this body being more a something than someone, and soon enough when he turns Gabino Rodríguez reveals that he will be “playing” the role of a man named Santiago Ramirez. And that yes this man is a raw life, because like the great number of human beings on our planet, he is caught in the spiral of a precarious life - being part of the precariat. What Gabino Rodríguez decided to do was to arrive in Tijuana and assume the personality of this imaginary yet likely very real in the sense of the everyday reality of individuals in this town- an imaginary man whom he will play for 176 days. It is worth nothing that one of the great contemporary art experiments post 1960s art was Lynne Hershman’s  invention of the character Roberta Breitmore that she went on to portray and “actually opening a bank account, obtaining credit cards, renting an apartment, seeing a psychiatrist, and becoming involved in trendy occupations, such as EST and Weight Watchers” for five years.   http://www.lynnhershman.com/project/roberta-breitmore/

Gabino Rodríguez and the  Performance Collective Tiradas al Sol (Lézards épivardés au soleil) have it under their purview to show the other side of geopoltiics. The invented Santiago he will play in real life will look for work in a job for minimum wage and assume all the lifestyle of such a precarious worker. He takes a room in a single men’s hotel and thus begins the temporary experimentation of life as Santiago for six months. Through minimalist movement and a distilled stage set Gabino Rodríguez seeks to portray  a life, the rawness of a life. 

Under the influence of cold medicine and flu and with a almost subtlety chromatic stage set, it is the aspects of the objects as almost hallucinatory evocations of the story that came through to this reviewer:  a fan that seemed to almost fly right out at the audience in booing everything like the various flags on the stage. A fern which seemed like an an almost anthropomorphic accompaniment. A painting  3d type of city landscape painting which seems to to work more in the memory after the fact than during the performance where it seemed flat. His bright red football jersey. A sketchy looking Well Fargo bank bag. A minimalist model of a city made of bricks. And a screen where we often see Gabino playing Santiago and then of course the real Gabino playing Santiago right next to it.  As Gabino says, from the day it began, I am now an Another. And certainly all that takes place during the performance to meant to accumulate the verifiability of this experiment to the audience. But what this reviewer found more interesting in the fevered state in which he viewed the performance were the elements and not the whole. The elements of the stage set that seemed to each work on their own with almost hallucinatory capabilities. 

One wonders if it might be best for this collective to rethink the value of each object on that stage and to reconsider how to best instrumentalize the value of each other objects. As a whole the performance works because of tis durational aspect. After awhile even within the state of a fever induced trance, one understands that this actor has gone through a kind of transhistorical moment - “transversalizing” his risk with the risk of the environment he was entering into. The question is did we as viewers feel too much of the quotidian as banal and not as something immediate - as something immediately dangerous. For to assume the identity of another is no easy task - for it is in it’s literal sense a transubstantiation from one being to another. One wonders, beyond this reviewer’s flu induced view of the show, if the audience was able to feel not the immediacy of the actor of the stage but moreover the immediacy of this raw and precarious life presented? A very nice reference to see the kind of work where the immediacy of a transubstantiation take s place in it’s greatest immediacy is Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason “played by”Jason.

:https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/portrait-of-jason-and-the-life-of-movies. 

One might also think to the penultimate episode of the British tv series The Prisoner, but then again how is one to subsume into another and authentically show this on stage- to let it hatch and to show the real dark attachment that is herein present. Through greater dramatization, careful distillation? 

For to truly go beyond the boundary of just presenting, and to  communicate total immediacy does there have to be very present  arc and even within the range of this reviewer’s capabilities in this particular viewing, one might ask whether the audience missed out on any kind of arc, but then is the flat plane of this existence what the director prefers to show in it’s anti- spectacularity. And if that is so, one might ask if this Collective has considered all the necessary tools of anti spectacle that might better grasp their audience (even if the goal is not spectacle). Was their enough a risk taken on stage as had been taken in the documentary adventure they enacted in the city of Tijuana by Gabino ? Were we simply looking at a documentary theatrical representation and not an actual enactment of the mode of being that would have led him from being Gabino to Santiago. Certainly after the duration, one did start conflating Santiago on screen and  Santiago that was in front of us, but were we convinced in an immediate way with this body that had gone from being one person to being Another? 

Cautionary Tales Past-Due: The Architectures and the Optical Unconsciouses of Empire in Ivo van Hove’s Kings of WarFestival Trans Amériques - May 24- May 27 2018 

I'm looking across the fields. At the land of my father. It's beautiful. It makes me want to move back for good, but that'd be problematical...Here's to the man who killed my sister... to a murderer.  The Celebration (Festen) Thomas Vinterberg

The floating air of hubris- the total evincing of a star that grows until it is burst.  In fact not a star but just the pure violence of succession, madness, dynasty, and privilege. The bright white silver star enfolds unto itself, and folds into a black hole…This in a nutshell is van Hove’s brilliant and sterling Kings of War. It is in madness and in madness’ foaming mouth (which we often see in van Hove’s King of Wars) as it relates to hubris and Empire’s justifiable madness that Ivo van Hove properly plunges his spectators in. Van Hove essentially shows hundreds of years of would be kings killing would be kings and Queens (of the English branch of the Henry Plantagenets)  that would lurch above it all and below it all. Whether his blood power thirsty lurching or living below the activities of empire with preponderance, distance, and indifference, one thing that van Hove brings home in almost glacial terms is the inevitability of the repeat button, that is a past due cautionary tale for our present age. Think of the genocide repeat button of Rwanda and scathing dark holes of Darfur, Syria, and Somalia. And that yes even in today’s “post” would-be king  killing ruling-king, still ringing through but in perhaps differing tones, degrees, and forms of display.  One might think to the triumvirate which wreaks of  being an oblivious animation, but yet with very real world circumstances -  Trump- Putin- Kim Jong.

The point is that we are still stuck in the Kings of War- (The floating air of hubris- the total evincing of a star that grows until it is burst), even if van Hove’s play ends on a “good note” by showing the "the last” bloody battle for empire among the Henry Plantagenet clan  - noting that it would be the last blood soaked venture for that particular crown- that is after watching a very effectual succession of King after King plotting and triumphing usually via a new red carpet event van Hove stages each time the new King is crowned. Blood precedes spectacle and vice versa. 

For the reality that settles in which might be the original point of van Hove’s presentation is that memory sticks - the living memory of each bloodbath that  has preceded our present moment - and that there is no way around it, no escaping it.  How could any viewer watch the pomp and circumstance of van Hove’s Kings of War and not be reminded of the recent Hollywood meets Royalty absurdity of the finally tamed bad boy Prince Harry and the flailing Suits actress Megan Markle (but of course they are the most progressive and least harmful of that branch). Blood has preceded all these absurdities and we simply cannot forget that. Van Hove stages the blood as a bloodless hologram like square that we must enter into and stay there. Not once in this four and half hour epic did I feel the need to take leave of my seat. Van Hove uses suspense not as gimmick but as a necessary anti- device to not so much key us but instead rail us in. In the first instance, we have the exposition of the history of bloodsucking succubus like royals, but then van Hove goes below the surface into the intersection between phenomenologies of madness and power (or more specifically of aristocracy.  

For any viewer that sat through the flawlessly presented, enjoyable, and timeless four hours of van Hove’s subtle melodrama, such a viewer could not remove the bloodied memory after memory of plot after plot of Kings plotting for land and sovereign lands, and thus van Hove realizes that there can never be a good ending in a story which has so rapturously been lived and so bloodlessly ends. For the blood that began the battles for empire and the blood in the mid times of empires can never be extolled and this might be van Hove’s point  (especially with direct references to Putin and Trump in one scene) - that we cannot escape the blood filled streets and fields we stand on (think U2′s classic album War and that concert some of us were gifted to attend on October 1, 1987 at the Olympic Stadium ), and that Empire is a spectral ghost of memory that comes again and again to haunt us in all of our waking nights terrors. Bravo for FTA presenting this. Of course some discursive contextualization is important to such powerful presentations to put such works in our own contexts (right here in our post Resident School system society) to properly flush out our own relationships to such ideologies of succession and Empire. I believe an important FTA event regarding spectrality and our indigenous “past” has been cancelled. We can perhaps look to Lara Kramer and see what she can offer us in such horizons.

If we live in a time where our own leadership fails to properly flush out “our past” except in melodramatic tones (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-FWK-NJ_lM ), one might ask -  Is the theatre, as van Hove has demonstrated  the site for such terms of reconciliation, calling into question, and putting in perspective out of control hubris. But of course this has always been what Shakespeare’s works  have been proposing for hundreds of years. Within such considerations as just presented,  a few questions might come up to consider the merits of van Hover’s Kings of War.

Here are four questions I decided to consider regarding Ivo van Hove’s Kings of War. 

(1) So how can one consider this repeat button of Empire (and hubris), as one might put it, and can one consider it in a novel (new) manner through the lenses of van Hove’s presentation? Does he bring something new to Shakespeare’s  stories.

(2) Does van Hove offer a sense of transubstantiation to his audience, which it seems Shakespeare was trying to offer in his deep poetic culling of entrails, blood guts, and phenomenologies of power?  In Shakespeare, the poetry is the underbelly of an age. The poetry in Shakespeare is the phenomenological stirring below the action- the deep psychosis and joy of a certain era. 

(3) Does van Hove provide us with the inevitable moral lesson of Shakespeare’s texts but, without entering into the trap of pure exposition. In one other words and to add to that,  one might ask, is there an optical unconscious that is exposed below the surface of Hove’s Shakespeare?

(4 ) How might one to consider the ruins of empire which is put before us in a different way after seeing van Hove’s Kings of War

(1)So how can one consider this repeat button of Empire (and hubris), as one might put it, and consider it in a novel manner through the lenses of van Hove’s presentation? Does he bring something new to Shakespeare’s  stories.

From the opening, Hove sets up a presentation of  “the ghost in the machine “ of Empire and this might not be original since it is Shakespeare’s main device. By ‘ghost in the machine” I am referring to the seeing the actual muscoskeleton behind the mouth of that person who is speaking- seeing the whirring oblivion that whizzes inside inside the beating heart, so to speak. What is key is that van Hove understands a novel way to present this through creating an endless set of dioramas which almost set the viewer into looking into a crystalline object. A first look at the set seems flat and normalized, but once we are in it, the dioramas are endless and some behind the stage where action is always going on keep us attuned to a multiverse. 

The stage might seem gimmicky at first but by setting our attention in all kinds of directions of rectingular objects and screens, but yet steadying us with one main screen which sometimes holds the crown, sometimes holds a pie, and then we as viewers are forced into hyperaware states while also having to focus on one voice or several voices. There is in this sense an almost subtle manipulation of our way of seeing. We must be here yet there, and van Hove trains us in four hours and we begin to understand his system, adapt to it, and then assume it. It then becomes a way of instruction and a manner to learn and consider but not be bound by various formulations of ethics. By moving through the almost first three hours in this fashion and slowly more and more stripping down the stage (at then end,just a chair, just one actor from the previous twenty-something)  we are left more and more with just the voice and in fact as we end up in the last few acts, with just the voice of the debauched King Richard and an empty space. In this sense, this piece needs to be considered within the realm of dance, since the motion, motilty, and constant mutation colours the presentation. Trying to bring something new to Shakespeare’s stories is not the point nor is the point to play around with the original words, but in fact in presenting a text by text presentation of Shakespeare without any changes, Hove and his actors could focus on “contourning” the poetry of the text.  That is in inserting the poetry into and out of the story as supporting arcs of the story. That is that Shakespeare’s poetry his theatre is at times presented as an obfuscating bouquet of words. In van Hove, as I have said above, the poetry becomes part of the phenomenology (see Gaston Bachelard and his various books on water, air, earth and poetry)- becomes a way for us to understand more why these desperate souls did such atrocities to those closest to them. In a performance, one cannot just read poetry to an audience, but rather one must present the interior of those words and present the skeletal aspects of what is being said- the scaffolding above and below the words. 

That is that to really truly be in Shakespeare, one has to enter into the depths of  the actual poetry, and those poetics are consistently entrail filled, bloody, glacial, and yet they are ways presenting something spectral. The spectrality of Empire most often is the case, the spectrality of power and its ghost coming back again and again. To afford such a dive deep into spectrality requires a distilled manner, a nimble way of yes staging the text but moreover a way of also distancing oneself from the text. Now while this was Shakespeare word for word, van Hove ingeniously takes control of the text and at times makes it matter and at other times allows it to just be a backdrop to the more important theatralization.  And that is the point- the words do not always have to matter (see Benoît Lachambre’s latest Platon directed by Dana Michel). What is novel (new) here is the symbiotic relationship that van Hove does in allowing this constant back and forth the text’s importance and unimportance and the actual body of the actors importance. It is in fact in the physicality of the actors that we start to become acquainted, with what is going on, to use Marvin Gaye’s expression. The hubris leaves the text and becomes embodied - each in varying ways by each actor. And even when they switch to another character in a later part of the story, the memory of the last character they played carries over and imbues the new character reminding us that the story is about succession and the walls aways keeping and returning “the ghost”. One often feels like with each act, van Hove opens a ice-slabbed fridge and takes out the characters who played the last set of characters and reanimates them again according to what they had last played into the next role. Human greed and power thus often comes in the guise of repetition.  This succession allows us to not just hear or see Empire but to actually feel an intimacy with it. To understand, must we not be intimate with even the most evil of circumstances?  This might be the very novel (new) arrangement here that van Hove is presenting- this notion of an intimacy van Hove sets up for us in the midst of the bloodbath of Wars. For intimacy is and will always be a part of the arsenal of Empire and it is something that we as viewers of the histories must understand. Has neoliberalism not borrowed this use of intimacy to infiltrate into its denizen? Of course we are signalling a misplaced intimacy. Of course, we are talking about an intimacy which ultimately becomes one that is misplaced and mis-used, but nevertheless we are talking about a very pathological erotic appropriation of trust, love, and circumstance where what we see at the end is ultimately Empire’s sadistic nature. As a child of Empire, I recall descriptions of British soldiers using the bayonets to prod citizens in Guyana in the 1950s.  It is this subtle presentation of the sadism that rings so true in Hove’s presentation. His King Richard’s sadism is never something we accept as justifiable but it is something we begin to feel intimately.  

(2)Another question that might come up is whether van Hove offers a sense of transubstantiation to his audience which it seems Shakespeare was trying to offer in his deep poetic culling of entrails, blood guts, and phenomenologies of power?  And this again might be a another novel discovery in Hove’s presentation. 

It might be in his set design and use of the back stage area  that we might find some of the legacies and deployment of Shakespeare’s notions of transubstantiation. Reminiscent of Romeo Castellucci’s white on white clinical penchant (also see Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest film), we are consistently led via the camera (so there even is s sense of “trans” (trans-media, transubstantiation etc) to see people killed in the back hallways of the stage, lie dying, lie in prisons, lie waiting. Hove sets up a hallway we can see on stage. But at the end of that hallway, is another hallway we can only see via a surveillance camera. 

Hove uses this backstage as a kind staging area which becomes another player of what I mentioned earlier of sometimes just silencing Shakespeare’s texts and letting the visual immediacy speak volumes. I would say that van Hove’s piece unlike other Shakespeare’s stagings do not focus on transubstantiation but it does hint at the relationship between the occult and power- for here we have a cabal of aristocracy consistently stirring the pot. The transubstantiation he does show is the consistent changeling of human power to human power. So there is never a real change into something but a consistent dead black foaming mouth. This he shows so well in this back staging area and via the video feed of that area. One might think to Beckett’s Depeupleur, when thinking of that scene. 

(3) Does van Hove provide us with the inevitable moral lesson of Shakespeare’s texts but, without entering into the trap of pure exposition. In one other words and to add to that,  one might ask, is there an optical unconscious that is exposed below the surface of Hove’s Shakespeare?

This for me the the honest originality of van Hove’s presentation. At the end of Kings of War, we have not just seen a vital piece of theatre or just a Faulknerian map of a county’s history - what Hive successfully leaves us with (and I guess also stages) is a notion of the optical unconscious of Empire. For if van Hove presents us with memory after memory, as I began by saying or the reality that settles in which might be the original point of Hove’s presentation is that memory sticks - the living memory of each bloodbath that  has preceded our present moment - and that there is no way around it, no escaping it.  And in not escaping it, the share duration of his presentation offers us an almost psychoanalysis of empire- of empire psychosis, of empire’s personality disorder, of empire’s socio-pathology and psychopathology. When van Hove decides to play Joy Division at one point, all of our optical unconsciousnesses cannot help but remember Ian Curtis going into epileptic shocks as he sang the haunting music describing the impending age of greed 1980s. Van Hove dives us in- we see below the surface of empire and we look up from below towards its rotting and bloody very full trunks above the ground while listening to the dying Ian Curtis.  I often refer to this quote when I think a piece of art has reached great heights in describing troubling ages- TS Eliot says

The trilling wire in the blood

Sings below inveterate scars

Appeasing long forgotten wars.

The dance along the artery

The circulation of the lymph

Are figured in the drift of stars

Ascend to summer in the tree

We move above the moving tree

In light upon the figured leaf

And hear upon the sodden floor

Below, the boarhound and the boar

Pursue their pattern as before

(4 ) How might one to consider the ruins of empire which is put before us in a different way after seeing Hove’s Kings of War?

Hove has created a historical palimpsest. The value of this is as I have just stated, is in being a place and time map which offers a view into the optical unconscious of a certain are. As such, Kings of War is a map of particular ideology and development of an ideology. In doing the such, we can see the nascent notion of geopolitics that Shakepeare’s work was always depicting avant la lettre. To understand the geopolis, seems to have been a key notion of Hove’s presentation. First in literally starting with maps but then in presenting tableau after tableau which are transposed one after the other, and one on top of the other. This transposition is not a simple tracing of history but a series of coloured in sketches that we as viewers are forced to still retain from each preceding scene (because after all we are on the same stage during 300 plus years of history he illustrates). Here what occurs is the assemblage of a palimpsest of the not King Henry dynasty, but also a palimpsest that includes the pre British roots of Empire, and Empire itself as it begun to slowly acquire the properties of it’s commonwealth (Caribbean, India etc). To present the viewer with a palimpsest is to offer an aesthetic, manageable, architectural (architectonic geopolitical wise) model of the story and age described which  does not impose a notion of ethical - moral pin pointing, but just shows the entire ensemble such that the repetition after repetition forms this palimpsest- a palimpsest of the roots of empire that we so desperately need to look at in our so-called times of reconciliation. 

Review Written by James Oscar

"  Cosmos for me, is black, first and foremost black, something like a black churning current full of whirls, stoppages, flood waters, a black water carrying lots of refuse, and there is man gazing at it—gazing at it and swept up by it—trying to decipher, to understand and to bind it into some kind of a whole . . . ” Witold Gombrowicz All swelled ‘they’ Move in this slow, rhythmic gaze to avoid this edge but at its limit line or this uncertain edge, we see it as distance, as a remote as something some removes away from whatever could be our concern - we sit and swell or rather walk by seeing the swell in what seems the distance [this decrepit] we walk relieved to be in this uncertain real. Godsholle, James Oscar Single counter- swimmer, you /count them, touch them/ all Paul Celan I'm prisoned in a flat universe bounded on all sides by the spectacle's screen. Society of the Spectacle-  Guy Debord A verb-form employed as possibly what might be  - hopeful- WOULD- this verb. Would that we could, would that we might, would that we can. would that we might have, and that of the hopeful of the mush floating in the middle of the black pool. As the erstwhile cosmic pejorist Witold Gombrowicz would say of the black churning at the heart of the cosmos- the mush at the center of the black pool - that is, of its cosmic chaosmosis, that is of archipelagoes (1), " Cosmos for me, is black, first and foremost black, something like a black churning current full of whirls, stoppages, flood waters, a black water carrying lots of refuse, and there is man gazing at it—gazing at it and swept up by it—trying to decipher, to understand and to bind it into some kind of a whole . . . ” This man- that is that man (2) - gazing at it (at the black churning) - gazing at it and swept up by it trying to decipher, to understand - one might find in the form of the dancer Marc Boivin in Mélanie Demers' latest offering, Would. If Demers has set a certain practice in motion (see Animal Triste &We'll Be Fine) that she has previously described to this writer as, "The live show is a perfect place to question the enigmas of our lives. As soon as the stars align and a parcel of inspiration touches us, what might follow  might be in fact  be perilous, what might follow might be something forbidden, what might follow might be a light…", Would attempts to shine such light by employing the action- verb "Would", not as simple utopia-verbiage (slogan) but as a kind of rudder  (and mantra- introspection) to navigate contemporary black pools (we -contemporary life are presently striding in and around)  "carrying lots of refuse". As Would opens with Marc Boivin's suppositions (3) of "would could be and what could be might look like", "It would be here", "It would be now", "It would be new", "It would be fulfilment', "It would be inside…intimate, desire, inside our skin, luminescent, butterflies, in front, behind, ultimate decisions, not that big, total change, rough notes, clear, good, moments of ecstasy, calm, a whole universe, the big bang, good ideas, bad ideas, slow motion, clear, chaos, small to start, constantly changing. uncomfortable, , confusing, clear, intentional, holding the whole world, in your hand, quiet, loud-  all motifs of a kind of a loom that Demers's has been imagining piece after piece, as a kind of a post-liberal thinking space (4) that continually seeks in her work after, during, and before the analytical to give way to a dance (5) , and then to a possible new space to dance beyond all the heavy phatic (post) liberal censorship parameters we civilized liberals have built up into impossible webs we now find ourselves caught in. The question amidst this all- amidst whole flotilla (that Demers dancers illustrate by saying and writing)  of post-industrial creative class liberal contortions of language, rule, and new political correct hemming, as a friend has recently suggested - the question remains- "What is worth fighting for."

And this is what Demers is strong at laying out (that spate of a "still fight' and ) - that non-interstitial space many seem to be caught in (6) - as though stuck inside an infomercial inside a social media app inside a real life inside a virtual world - the slip and slides of a kind of post industrial gel and lubricant everyone has rubbed on their skin (7) and rolls around  with through the vast wastelands trying to remove- aspects of  the fluorescent gel that is always there, and further rolling again adding more gel to the already lubricated body. As I put it vis a vis Demers recent performance titled "We'll Be Fine" in a piece this reviewer has recently viewed, - I asked - "How can we be fine?". And as I might have intoned of that  performance piece, in the tones of asking "what is worth fighting for" (8), and also in the sense of the elaborating archipelagoes (so viscerally visualized by Marc Boivin's movements in Would) that start to grow off our bodies (spawned by contemporary gels, lubricants, ideas, social media "friends", "posts", "likes", "ghostings"), faltering "deeper into contemporary society’s black comedy hole. And it is Boivin's movements (9) (flailing arms)  that get properly employed as particular kind of paddle/ rudder to navigate the archipelagoes that appear in this brooding black fog (the precursor-situation which has led to this situation of suppositions of the Would). All this arises out of his word-pronouncements and their utopic-possibilities- these territories of the possible - both dystopic and utopia always at once- territories of the present horror.  There are Bovin and Kate Holden's constant bodily motions vis these archipelagoes they elaborate and describe, and then their "trouncing through" with movements that approximate discomfit, which I can only describe as consistently approximating motions of "reeling"- reeling it all in, that is. In this sense, one might consider Bovin and Holden as anglers- angler- dancers stuck at a precipice. They might have been told of a dried up lake that will one day again have a bounty of fruition- of future flora, future fauna, and future bouquets of marine life. Bovin and Holden spell out the possible and reach out their elongated arms(angling prostheses)- waiting for a possible catch- al in that way that Demers' seems to be nurturing performance after performance. As Demers has previously quoted of a favourite author of hers to this reviewer taking care to see these kinds of spaces that could be both at once horizons and big yawning gaps- "For a very long time, I have lived with René Barjavel's The Tiger's Hunger. On the fourth page it says": "Man finds himself faced with two destinies: to die in his cradle, by his own hand, by his own genius, by his own stupidity, or to jump for eternity into the infinity of space, and to spread and roll in that life delivered from the necessity of murder. The choice is to be made tomorrow. Perhaps the choice has already been made. (10) Demers' interests, however, seem to not be so much in sustained moments of the sublime interstitial;  of course, her dancers give slight  (very momentary) whiffs of such ineffable spates, as they navigate through the contemporary fodder they describe and attempt to move through on stage. Demers' work might be said to deal with/ probe in the areas of what I might call "the reality principle" (11). Demers' work may not always be that site for the sore eyes seeking the sublime in dance, but perhaps that might be the point. There might be a bit of Pina in this or even a bit of the "reality principle" a choreographer like Tanya Beyeler employs. If one comes back to the the very principle of the verb-form I have begun with (would that we could, would that we might, would that we can. would that we might have) and Demers' always present word-play as a form to then sculpt the body in and around- that is to dance around the verb WOULD -  to move in that hopeful mush floating in the middle of the black pool- -that  black churning at the heart of the cosmos- and if we can then perhaps fathom  the word Would as an anthropomorphic- thing (not just a word), one might be able to see that "  black churning current full of whirls" and Marc Boivin as a man holding the such in his hands (as a  handler and shaper of the such - and handing it back and forth and vice versa between them with he and Holden, and then ultimately coming to hold the Would himself again  at the end, after having consulted with it and entered into a conjuration with it) . Let us take then take the WOULD, in Demers' Would  and see it not as didactic but as kind of conjurer's spell - and a word that becomes a word-engager to hold and let grow "trying to decipher, to understand and to bind it into some kind of a whole . . . ”.  Demers' Would  in this sense might be about "reeling in existence" (searching for a feeling for that imperceptible object)  - and yes here are what our anglers/ dancers- Boivin and might be engaged in - a reeling in of existence. If Would might have somewhat of a coldness to it, (one could possibly relegate that as a consequence of the outfall of trying to address our cold slab contemporary world by employing the reality principle ), one could think to Guy Debord's practical observation that critical truth of the spectacle calls for a "commitment to a practical struggle alongside the spectacle's irreconcilable enemies", and thus one understands the fate of the "counter- swimmer" among the sharks, but nevertheless one might ask Demers about the next stage in her piercing through the spectacle and thus the next stage of presenting more and more of the the "reality principle ", and of presenting what is on the "other- side" of the spyglass- the further ride down the river styx, so to speak, and views of the antipodes one might only get to at the end.

In concluding, this reviewer noticed that it was admittedly very difficult to forget the previous presence of two other angler -dancers of sorts seen a few years ago on this same stage in similar emboldened views towards from the precipice  in the piece Untied Tales (Clara Furey and Peter Jasko) with which they have impregnated Lachapelle's stage forever with a permanent residues.  Furey and Jasko, whose full jump into the interstitial , but yet still with their ability to at once present a searing walk and roll through the "realty principle",  yet in almost monochrome magically-real terms- their performance remaining a definite prima facie contemporary art example of staring at and at once dancing around the "black churning current",  and crossing amongst its foam (traverser sur l'écume)

Quantum Diamond  Impression-Unit”- A Review of Ghost Rings

“Quantum Diamond  Impression1-Unit”: A Review (or Set of Hallucinations Based On) Ghost Rings by Tina Satter Théatre La Chapelle, Montreal, Canada Saturday August 26, 2017

“The scintillation was the spark, It was the smoke streaming, It was after all, at its end ‘A sort of diamond’.”

Godsholle (A Play), James Oscar

I’m definitely into the idea of queering, approaching the object not for what it is actually meant to be used for as a way to engage with it differently, as a way to open up potentialities within the object. Like “This now is not a vase...Queer can mean so many things. I work with queer aesthetics, which is something that has to do with lineage and history. But then to me queer is about outside of the norm, the moment before something is actually defined...A lot of people want to talk about the queer aspects of my work. We can talk about sexuality, we can talk about aesthetics — there are particular expectations of a queer thing. But for me, when it is really queer, we have no idea what the fuck it is." 

Cult MTL- September 9, 2016- Interview of Andrew Tay with James Oscar

“Conduire le réel jusqu’a l’action comme une fleur glissée a la bouche acide des petits enfants. Connaissance ineffable du diamant désespéré (la vie). 

Rene Char, Feuillets d’Hypnos

Of Ghostrings & Quantum Diamonds:

Tina Satter describes the “ghost rings” of her play of the same name, in much more simple terms - as the name of a “candy I made up in 2011” that ‘her sister’ and ‘her’ might have munched on.   But do not be fooled by  this simple explanation, because no sooner do we encounter the complex arrow of time that is Ghost RIngs where the play comes to share something of the complexity of an octahedron (like a diamond) such that I could not help but leave the performance with the strange conceptual term (quantum diamond impression )  resounding in my head, as though I had just seen such a fabulated object as the such (a quantum diamond) and  that with the such,  I had found an analogous" modal being"  to what I just had seen in Tina Satter’s Ghost Rings  -   Ghost Rings '  shapes and forms coming to resemble “something like” a quantum diamond impression/ expression. This imaginary quantum diamond impression/ expression-unit I have fabulated to describe ‘her craft’

That Tina Satter’s Ghost Ring’s appears to me to form some kind of vehicle or rather unconstraining form-  one which I might conceptually describe as this imaginary quantum diamond I have fathomed, with all its interpenetrating rays, angles, and affirmations as described above, and in fact seeing the whole of the play forming a kind of vehicle or unit resembling something that might look like a quantum diamond - the assemblage of her Ghost Rings akin to a  vehicle/ vehicular rather -  with the purpose of what I might call being an “impression or expression- unit”.

Vehicular:

For at the end of the minimalist presentation, a web  has been created that has been entered into  and travelled with - something vehicular- something like a unit that we step out of having been profusely interpenetrated by at every angle -  by first Tina Satter’s dialogue about her sister Samantha’s all the time reckless/ sometimes numinous life. (I have to say that I immediately thought of Anne Carson’s  experimental fold out novel project Nox about her all-the-time drifter brother “Michael, who in adulthood fell into drugs and, finally, drifting under false identities. (In her words, he “ran away in 1978, rather than go to jail.”) He died in Copenhagen in 2000, doing who knows what.”

As in any vehicle, we first spot the "starter", and this might come in the form of musician Chris Giarmo’s “ceramically -pristine” slip-on shoes (see Dorothy ruby red shoes and their status as a sort of wind-up or "inciter") that  he wrests to the side as he begins the  deep sounding opening music.  (He consequently also wears a diamond spangled baseball hat.) Satter 's Ghost Rings via the nod of  an object* and via musical " incantation" then announces   that we will be entering into the psycho-geographic territory of her crazy-eyed sister Samantha, who much like Anne Carson’s brother seemed to have the soundings of being one of those hyper-sensitive/ hyper empath/ beautiful souls who get lost to the contemporary (world) (see Valerie Solanas et al) .

Blood Sisters:

To narrate this life of her sister Samantha  with whom she pledged an epic blood sisterhood4 promising to “grow up and have corner apartments in the same building and raise their (future imaginary) baby daughters” together (no men necessary) , she decided to make 'this kind of band’ on stage headlined by the actresses, and then as in most of Ghost Rings’ journey, she reveals that after having formulated this imaginary  play, she had recalled that actually she had been in a band with her sister, “I remembered I was in a band with my sister”.

Ghost Rings has this constant breaking the fourth wall (ellipsis) with Tina (director and writer- not actress) sitting behind the drums watching her own life drama of her sister unfolding in front of her on stage. As we get deeper into the story (see the quantum spheres of Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, NY) , there is a kind of almost quantum feeling as the stories about her sister confound one upon another upon another until the drama feels like a vessel we have crawled into and are watching  from inside- the various spheres and facets of Samantha's "life-styles" splayed throughout  an imaginary geodesic dome. The ghost rings appearing again and again, and soon attaining a greater significance than just that of an imaginary candy TIna Satter fabulated up as part of her on-stage /or ”real” childhood stories..

They Ride Haunted Canoes/ Peter Doig's Haunted Canoes:

Tina imparts to us the task of understanding what she might actually mean by “ghost rings” beyond being just simply an imaginary candy her and her sister chomped on as young girls. Satter does describe an actual vehicle as her introductory device to move us through her sister (and her own) circles of hell (and more). In this first story of her sister and her during her teenage years (rather that is moreover the first 'on stage story' during "their" teenage years), crazy-eyed  teen Samantha  gulps down fourteen ghost ring candies “cause it it was making too much of a bulge in a cool bag she had" (paraphrase), and then the always hyper-aware, hypersensitive, hyper empathic Samantha or her sister embark on a haunted canoe - the first of several vehicular lieux/ devices  of Ghost Rings.

My own instantaneous visualization that this quantum canoe could look something like the Scottish painter Peter Doig’s celebrated “canoe-reflection” paintings like “100 Years Ago” jived very well with the underlying fact that Satter was steering us towards something more than ghost rings as an imagined named for a candy from her childhood5. It is here after the haunted canoe ride that she reveals that beyond having just recounted the  teenage worry of the candies bulging and making her bag look uncool, that we (the audience and her) will now enter into the realm of “private inner being” - “a thing we are scared to touch, but  inside of you, something soft…..something you try to translate out.” It is here that she professes an inner fleshy chasm of loss (inner being as soft and furry); she seems to have never felt she tried enough with this lost soul who would drift in and out of her life, always desperate, always wanton.

Uncanny Valley

Throughout Ghost Rings, Satter with the wondrous acting/ singing of Erin Markey as "Samantha" and Kristin C Sieh "Samantha's friend" , continues to build this world (of a quantum diamond expression unit, as I have named it) somehow able to consistently access a kind of uncanny valley we are consistently subject to; whether we are focusing on ceramic shoes, looking at bedazzled scintillating tops, Satter’s own strange presence/ absence on stage watching  a story about “her”/ “her sister’s” life unfold right in front of her, or in the almost impeccably anthropomorphic employment of the toy animals as speaking beings  which is never kitsch or contrived but rather gives us the greatest feeling of a "comfortable" uncanny valley. It is an uncanny valley we are made to feel all the way until near the end, where it becomes really hard to not consider Sealy (the stuffed seal ) as nothing but a real entity that is speaking (see Amazonian Perspectivism). There is of course always the persisting uncanny valley seen through Erin Markey’s intense crazy eye facial expressions (almost ceramic glazed at times and coming alive at other times) (B), or  through the incredible virtuosity of the actress-singers turning what we are looking at on stage into a literal musical right before our eyes, yet still riding the rail of contemporary performance art (and somehow masterfully not betraying either genre through their virtuoso ability to move between both musical and drama, without falling into “irony” or “tragedy”), and finally this uncanny valley remains consistent throughout thanks to Markey’s delivery of a masterful and paced intensity vis a vis Sieh’s all-along building-up to an eye-popping cacophony- her trained slowly upward rising visceral physicality till its explosion at the end.

Denouement- Staging

There is a denouement that spell-binds us as we watch what feels often like a soft masterpiece (soft-piece) of dramaturgy (Think La La Land and how its own tight dramaturgy and transitions rendered it into “art”, not just film), in what first starts out as the empty uber-minimalist space soon to become before our very eyes populated with the "real" memories of two lives. Two "real" emotional lives we can grasp onto.  Tina playing Tina and Erin Markey playing her sister or Samantha or whoever’s world we have been drawn emotionally into onstage. There is certainly a gust of uncanniness to have come from this nothing (black box with minimal decor) in the play’s opening, to this now seething ‘history of two’ we had never seen or heard of before;  two that might have never actually been seen or heard before in actual fact, despite what we have been told. Yet, we still hang on to all of the stories as having been true ( another uncanny valley)- stories, first that Tina Satter actually had a sister, and then whether that sister had actually led a wayward and troubled life?

Chiasma/ Intermingling:

As is clearly said of these two beings (”Tina” / Satter and “her sister”) intermingling  of their own place at the hearth of/ inside this quantum diamond unit we might call their life (or just in the play), “ Just because we’re private inner beings, when I feel you, you get me. “ And as Tina remarks that a friend once remarked in one of these accidental running into Tina would have with her wayward sister in the later years (Tina in New York/ Samantha everywhere) -” he said our echo was eery”. 

So perhaps here, in the larger picture around all of this, there might be shadow-lessons of how to engage in a kind of complicity with Another (the kind of problematic, pleasures, and pains of founding a new ethics this might delve into looking at that is ( C)- and thus that ultimately as equally for the philosopher Levinas “ethics come to pass between two persons: oneself and the Other. These ethical claims are absolute; one is obliged to the Other to the point of being …” (D) And as I might amend Tina Satter’s line- Dear diary, I’ll draw you a map of being - that would be the inner and the outer and all the points that intersect between, or in fact as Satter/ her sister says at one juncture in Ghost Rings,” I put my legs over yours the other day.” 6

Transversalizing- the Quantum -Diamond Unit, Profusion, “Luv”:

So here, we return to how I began speaking of this conceptual extrapolation I made after being in the world of Tina Satter’s Ghost Rings, the space of a quantum diamond unit “at every angle and line 'transversalizing' cross-referencing, ‘cross-lining’ lines of light; and perhaps at its center, a kind of in/animate being that emit/s light and the light coming towards it from every point - interpenetrating rays all cross sectioning at its center, perhaps an inner being at the center of all things- cut right through, right at it” and at its imagined center a smoker’s blown smoke ring- and from here one might see of Satter’s great offerings with Ghost Ring’s, and perhaps something to speak about in terms of an “aesthetic of queer“ -  the idea of profusion7. For, as with the smoke rings at the centre that ultimately disperse out through every angle of the quantum diamond's slight pores- so do Tina Satter’s words, song, and gesture. For, if as she, in fact, does say that “Dear I’ll draw you a map of the area. There are trees I don’t know.”, the key might be to 'go there', to be profuse, to live in a kind of continual profusion- to be there, “thereness”. And this is both Satter’s regret - that she had not been “there” for her wayward sister, and now that at once right now in this play which speaks of not having been there, she can now in Ghost Rings be here - she is being “here”. And we as an audience might also be “there”- right there. We (who had also been lost)  are all there this time around for the lost and wayward Samantha or for Another.

Je Regrette:

Those lost regretted moments, the ghost rings that try and follow and persuade us of some immutable past done circumstance, “This is your person before you were a ghost”, she says of her sister. And of the immutable lost moment she says, “ How could we have stayed in that moment”. But alas, TIna Satter is not interested in some theatre of the absurd type penury. Instead, Tina Satter seems to literally hold the heart  - so to speak.

Tina Satter says of that haunted canoe she/ and or her sister travel/ed in- Tina as lost as Samantha, Samantha as lost as Tina:

“Row to the centre. Cross to the edge.” “Row to the centre. Cross to the edge.” “Row to the centre. Cross to the edge.”

1Or alternatively “Quantum- Diamond Impression Unit”.

2 I would like to make a not so neatly divided observation of what I have encountered as various types of theatre . For instance, a  “vehicular theatre"-  theatre that acts as vehicle -unit”, infinite theatre (Hanna Abd el Nour, Robert Wilson), theatre as trauma unit (Jocelyn Pelletier’s Permanent K-O, Marie Brassard’s Nely Arcan Fureur), theatre as hologram (Marie Brassard- Nely Arcan -Fureur),  theatre as “private hallucination” (Dana Michel) theatre as recounter of genealogies/ time immemorial (Faulkner, Benjamin Kamino - M/Other Untied Tales-Clara Furey, Peter Jasko, Chouinard Sacre de Printemps ) , theatre as new forms (Andrew Tay, Dana Michel, Untied Tales), theatre as meditation space (upcoming “When Even The” by Clara Furey “ for Leonard Cohen, Sankai Juku, theatre as exploring "new forms"- Andrew Tay, Dana Michel, Benoit Lachambre).

Ghost Rings, as a vehicular unit is executed through a serial set of episodes ‘in a life’ and it would translate well into contemporary experimental television that has been appearing more and more on platforms like Netflix. Ghost Rings with its various devices of “meta”, voice over (a life told), recurring characters and talking heads like the seal and deer would lend well to television today.

3 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/books/review/Ratliff-t.html?mcubz=0

4 Joan Jonas’ own evocations of the necessary re-kindling of lost secret sistren societies and all the requisite aesthetic choices that might come with that. As with Satter, there might be an affinity with certain characteristics like “translucence”, “the mirror”, twinship”, “mirror reflection”, melding with the other, self-same, “radiance”, scintillating aesthetics. Joan Jonas: From Away at DHC ART by James Oscar http://www.dailyserving.com/2016/09/joan-jonas-from-away-at-dhc-art/

This recent article by Hannah Black seems relevant in the sense of isolating a historical manner of female oral traditions and specifically the speaking of “gossip” among women as part of the history of women resistance, https://tankmagazine.com/issue-70/features/hannah-black/.

5 In her NY Times article, Laura Collins-Hughes does right in citing Ghost Rings as an “elliptical tale” and in realizing the aspect of the two actresses Erin Markey and Kristen C Sieh playing fictional characters (Satter’s sister and her sister's  friend, one is led to understand) but I do think that  the interesting possibility of Tina Satter having perhaps fabulated the story of this particular sister should have been considered even more, and not just actually assumed. s Collins-Hughes says “One strand of the show is Ms. Satter’s real story…Tina and her sister had a band together, once upon a time”- for, in realizing the possibility of fabulation (whether done or not)  this increases the even larger quantum and meta aspects of this presentation, which as I have said, for this writer begin to feel like an almost hologram like quantum diamond that we as the audience become couched inside. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/26/ theater/review-tina-satters-ghost-rings-an-elliptical-tale-of-lost-connections.html?mcubz=0

6 “I was your ghost when you…” Tina Satter - Ghost Rings

7 The jazz musician Sun Ra might be an interesting example of this idea of profusion - in his aesthetic and musical composition. The 1980s British filmmaker  Derek Jarman’s films are classic examples of profusion in the literal use of scrims and overlay, for example. And it is key to put it that Tina Satter’s own deadpan bare narration employs an effective “flat affect” as a counterpoint to the some of the "profusion" being presented.  See  Crossing over with Tilda Swinton— the Mistress of “Flat Affect”, International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, September 2015, Volume 28, Issue 3, pp 243–271

8 I am thinking of such a tradition that goes against the grain like Joan Jonas in the 1970s, Laurie Anderson in the 1980s, filmmakers like Julie Dash in the 1990s, or Ayoka Chenzira s Alma s Rainbow in the 1990s. A new radical refreshing tradition of ( experimental) storytelling is quite apt right now- Tina Satter s experiments are very interesting in this respect. To again cite contemporary television, there have been various attempts to adapt the such, of recent.

(A)In 1970 Masahiro Mori discovered an emotional response that humans have when faced with lifelike replicas of human beings (robots, dolls). He discovered a cognitive dissonance/  a negative emotional dip that would occur increase (with the greater ) the greater likeness  the more life like (when encountering ) the more life like the human replica encountered Increasing with the greater lifelikeness of the human replica (robot) encountered.Eeriness and revulsion would increase the more life like the dolls etc encountered "region of negative emotional response towards robots that seem "almost" human."

(B) See  OF FLESH-RADIOS, “PERMANENT” HYSTERIA,  AND LIFE AS STATUES: A Review of Marlene Monteiro Freitas’ Marfim-e-carne-as-estatuas-tambem-sofrem  (Of Ivory And Flesh- Statues Also Suffer) at Festival Transmériques theatre festival - June 3, 4 2015my http://nelliganmagazine.tumblr.com/post/120786035640/of-flesh-radios-permanent-hysteria-and-life

(C) The questions of “sameness” and “difference”,  and how ultimately reconciling with one might be a reconciling with the other. But then there is this split, this almost palpable sameness of her sister’s dark energy which is at the centre of her own being. They are, to put it, softly - intermingled. Facing our own complicities as posing of our own status as prey and predators, predators and prey. Not seeing ourselves outside the whole circle but inside and possibly a participant in all aspects of the circle of predator, prey, subject, object. Samantha’s “permanent hysteria” is Tina’s permanent hysteria. Ingmar Bergman has shown these glacial continguous and common valleys better than most artists in his time, in his Persona and The Silence. The slow seething seamless beings we often are- one to Another.

A talk with Tanya Beyeler about her Barcelona company's new play Possibilities that Disappear Before a Landscape and about ideas regarding  a "sluggish, lethargic Europe where everyone continues to live their daily lives and get drunk, despite a palpable collapse of both its underlying capitalist systems and the socialist utopias that nourished it in the past". "The Barcelona company El Conde de Torrefiel sculpts surprising, seemingly dormant landscapes throbbing with underlying, unacknowledged chaos. A theatrical excursion like an exhibit of contemporary art." James Oscar: The writer Frantz Fanon in his Wretched of the Earth, a 1960s classic book on "revolution "says :

"The Third World does not mean to organize a great crusade of hunger against the whole of Europe. What it expects from those who for centuries have kept it in slavery is that they will help it to rehabilitate mankind, and make man victorious everywhere, once and for all. But it is clear that we are not so naive as to think that this will come about with the cooperation and the good will of the European governments. This huge task which consists of reintroducing mankind into the world, the whole of mankind, will be carried out with the indispensable help, of the European peoples, who themselves must realize that in the past they have often joined the ranks of our common masters where colonial questions were concerned. To achieve this, the European peoples must first decide to wake up and shake themselves, use their brains, and stop playing the stupid game of the Sleeping Beauty." The last part reminds me of you talking about "sluggish, lethargic Europe where everyone continues to live their daily lives and get drunk, despite a palpable collapse of both its underlying capitalist systems and the socialist utopias that nourished it in the past...people who are bogged down in their daily routines...privilege wake up…tranquil citizenry". I always think of this scene in Antonioni's Blow Up where the band is playing on stage and all the "cool kids" are not dancing or moving- they just stare ahead in space - vacuous and immobile. Can you elaborate on this general state of affairs of this blank stare, lethargy which seems to be your starting point? Tanya Beyeler (El Conde de Torrefiel): This image of the “sleeping beauty” is very interesting because of the idea of an imposed sleep, a poison that doesn’t allow us to wake up and react. I don’t think it is a quite deliberate sleep, but there are very particular chains. These chains are totally perverse and numb to our responsibility in our historical present. Philippe Murray talks about the concept of “Homo festivus” which I like very much as a definition, as well as the one for “Homo economicus” because it marries this dichotomy between extreme irrationality and extreme rationality. I feel there is a tension between these two ways of existential behaviors that describe our way of life, and that there is a huge gap in between them that creates these accelerations in order to move from one to another, that creates this schizophrenia of nowadays, and that is in this garb that we could find our real space, that we can equalize with our real nature. This piece was conceived between 2014 and 2015, in a moment where we were totally exhausted and we had a deep need to stop. Even if we would not know what should stop. At the same time, we had the feeling that all the people that surrounded us, our friends, family, etc in Spain, were in the same situation. A lot of work, a lot of events, a lot of travels, a lot of everything, and everybody was tired, with a lot of things to do, a lot of activity but not really focussed, nobody had time to meet with others in quietness, or to meet with himself (themselves), everything was scheduled, even entertainment or free time was scheduled.

Entertainment is a “must do” thing (you have to be there in order to be updated, to be seen, to exist). Then we had the sensation of being kind of soldiers, workers of an invisible army, tired and without any benefit, poor and defeated: Cheap travels, cheap clothes, cheap relations, cheap friendships, cheap works. Everything very volatile, a real miseducation of bonding. The image was of being maddened cells of a sick organism, and like the metastasis of cancer,  those cells reproduce the illness in order to spread it with the frenetic pace. From this confused amount of feelings, we start to create the piece as a landscape, a panoramic view that doesn't attack the audience with its presence. James Oscar: There are some interesting new European filmmakers that seem to be experimenting with various forms of representation in the context of the current moment of crisis and lethargy. I am thinking of Roy Andersson (Songs from the Second Floor and A Pigeon Sat on A Branch Reflecting on Existence), Quentin Dupieux (Reality and Rubber), and Yorgos Lanthimos (Lobster, Dogtooth). Some of these artists are using speculative thinking, allegory, abstraction,  irony, the absurd, the mundane (everyday scenes?)  and other forms of representation to address a similar issue you are interested in - the moment of this crisis.  What forms of representation are you using in El Conde. What form of representation are you using to try and wake people up. Tanya Beyeler (El Conde de Torrefiel): Forms of representation are a very powerful tool to work directly on the meaning. Film frames are not at all the same as Theater, therefore the approach to images is very different. From the filmmakers you named, I like very much how they are hackers of reality as they present some very everyday situations/dynamics/images but they are tapped, they have interferences that open a huge dimension of (new) possibilities. Lately, on stage, our big concern was how to open new possibilities of meaning and sense using a close, recognizable language and forms. How to work in the abstract field from a concrete starting point. Right now, our stage devices are text and images. Text, always presented as a speech, reflection, or small story is a very concrete element, that allows us to break the rules of the narration and aesthetic without losing a grounded point. Text allows us to work images freely, and text and images don’t have to match. We are much more abstract with the image work, very much near to dance language, in order to offer an unpredictable aesthetic experience to the audience. All movements, colours, shapes on stage are choreographed, we always compose a big score of those elements and there is an important rhythmic component in the presentation of images, sound and light. Text allows us to go deeper with words in the ideas that surround the piece. It is always presented with distancing, off-recorded- voice, or projected text. The written text on stage is an added strong element of the choreography and at the same time gives the audience the opportunity to appropriate the text, as each of them might read it with their own voices. James Oscar: You speak about " increasing the layers of meaning in each of these staged images". Philippe Couture says, "Your work is based on disassociation between imagery, the body and the text. Why did you opt for that deconstruction"  You also say, "It's a question of viewing things from a distance so as to better perceive them." Can you elaborate on these comments:

Tanya Beyeler (El Conde de Torrefiel): Distance is definitely our way to approach the stage work. For the moment, this is the way that feels more ethical and fair towards others. Real life bombs the individual constantly with invitations to participate; there is a constant appeal to the first or second person. Outside we are constantly assaulted by mechanisms that call you to be this or that way, to look this or that way, to say this or that, to act and take a position, to decide but there is not very much place for reflection or for contemplation, or for doubt. The present is absolute and it erases the future and the past. This is very dangerous  - I think. Distance is the way to see with perspective, to give space to others, to seduce them from far away, to shorten the distance together, little by little. James Oscar: You mention Spencer Tunick and the philosopher  Zygmunt Bauman. Do you feel they just show the symptoms but offer no "solutions"? Of El Conde, beyond providing a representation of the symptoms, what else are your intentions? Tanya Beyeler (El Conde de Torrefiel): Zygmunt Bauman is not anymore in the piece as unfortunately, he died some months ago.The piece seeks to picture a present and the different layers that shape the present theatre and the multiple ways of perceiving this present. El Conde will never dare to offer a solution since we ourselves don't have it. We use the stage as a place to share our questions and worries about the world we are living in. We are contemporary theatre because we present human matters (that are always the same) with contemporary forms of approach to them, and we do so to an audience of people who are living our same historical moment. We offer the audience an aesthetic experience related to these matters, with forms that break the standard rules of the construction of the discourse. James Oscar: A Brazilian friend recently came from Spain and she was frightened by the unhidden and confrontational racism she was subject to everyday. This seems to be an important issue globally now. Does El Conde have any reflections in regards to this? Tanya Beyeler (El Conde de Torrefiel): It's funny, as I had the same feeling in Brazil (not towards me). This makes me think that racism is an ancient issue, actually defined as global issue, probably rooted in a very deep and basic part of our human nature. It is very much installed in society, and each country deals with it in a different way. But still, it is racism. I have racist behaviours. Towards tourists, for instance, I feel very inflexible. Because I feel them as a threat for my ecosystem, my environment. James Oscar: The word disappear is in the title of your upcoming show. Can you explain why ideas of  "disappearance " are important in your work- the disappearance of people's ideas, ideals, social responsibility? What do you mean by "disappearance" in El Conde? Tanya Beyeler (El Conde de Torrefiel): The concept of disappearing was very present in the starting point of the piece. It is not always important in the company’s work, but it was in this work. The tragedy of the human being resides in its disappearance, and that even if humanity progresses, humans have always to start from zero. Each person that is born in this world needs to experience things (for) from itself. The experience of others is not enough. Each body has to move about through its own experiences. Time disappears and with it History and the stories of predecessors. And the Presents covers the layers of the Past. James Oscar: Walter Benjamin refers to a state of emergency. I have always said that citizens should call their own state of emergency? Would El Conde be something that might fall under a kind of citizen-led call for realizing a certain state of emergency?

« Oscillation, ancrage et l’émerveillement d’être » (Lifeguard, 29 mai au 1er juin, FTA 2017) : Une entrevue avec Benoît Lachambre

J'ai commencé par lire une citation colorée, écrite dans une façon « noir soleil obscur » par le maître du cinéma Philippe Grandrieux, citation dans laquelle je sentais pouvoir souligner poétiquement les tendances que nous voyons souvent – d'un côté, l’art en fonction des notions d'individuation puis, de l’autre côté, un art qui fonctionne dans les coulisses des idées de communauté. J'avais déjà estimé que, ce faisant, je suggérais une fausse dichotomie en proposant une telle division entre ces « deux » territoires d’art.

Avec Benoît - son esprit et son corps toujours imprégnés de notions prescientes de l'endroit où vous (son interlocuteur) êtes, de l'endroit où vous (son interlocuteur), essayez d'aller- sa générosité d’esprit totale. Benoît toujours imprégné de notions prescientes de ce que vous essayez de dire ou pourriez dire un jour; il est devenu évident qu'aucune citation n'était nécessaire - car j'étais en fait entre les mains d'un des plus grands et intuitifs hommes de mouvement/art/danse contemporain/e. Un souffle et de nombreux souffles ont été émis par Benoît - des souffles construisant une « belle maison de pensée vivante » et une présence radicale de sifflements muets qui dirigent, mais de façon maïeutique. Benoît toujours en train de façonner des souffles restant invisibles et rendu visibles simultanément.

James Oscar - Pourrait-on dire que la chronologie des pièces, partant de Snakeskin à Prisme à Before We Go à Hyperterrestres jusqu'à Lifeguard (présentée du 29 mai au 1er juin), suit une certaine trajectoire ; certaines pièces avant mettant le poids plutôt sur l'individuation (la quête individuelle) et maintenant, avec Lifeguard, le poids serait plutôt sur la communauté? Pourriez-vous parler de la trajectoire de Snakeskin à Prisme à Before We Go à Hyperterrestres jusqu'à Lifeguard - tous vers le côté relationnel ?

Benoît Lachambre - Sûrement que la performance Lifeguard est effectivement, est un peu décalée de ce qui s’est passé avec Before We Go, mais Before We Go est très relationnelle, par contre. Du côté de Snakeskin, il y a un peu une déambulation qui demeure très dans l'ordre du spectaculaire, et je dirais que ce qui est changé est le désir de mettre de façon plus évidente le travail somatique. Donc, dans le travail somatique, ce qui ressort justement, c'est le relationnel – c'est comment le temps est toujours en relation soit avec une autre personne, soit avec les liens spatiaux;  le corps est constamment en lien. Donc c'est dans ce lien-là, du moins ce qui m'intéresse dans ce travail somatique, c'est dans ce lien-là que ça existe le plus qu’il y a le plus de mobilité et de danse. Donc ce que je faisais auparavant, c'était d'essayer décrire ce lien-là, pas de l’écrire, mais de le  transmettre dans une spontanéité. Alors, maintenant, j'ai pris la décision que j'avais besoin d'enlever la spontanéité et les dispositifs performatifs et de adresser à quelque chose beaucoup plus partagée, d'avoir quelque chose beaucoup  plus partager comme dispositif spatial de performance.

Et qui permet aussi de s'adresser beaucoup plus au sens du spectateur, parce que les spectateurs n'ont plus le même rôle. Le rôle du spectateur est changé. Moi en temps que performeur, je me considère aussi comme spectateur, des spectateurs. Donc. Et que la présence du spectateur est une présence qui est pour moi à mes yeux une présence chorégraphique. [Je suis] Beaucoup intéressé par l’élément chorégraphique, pas nécessairement par l'action du chorégraphe. Parce j’essaye de déplacer l'action chorégraphique, la déplacer un peu du chorégraphe, parce que le chronographe, tel que compris dans un point de vue plus conventionnel, c’est  la personne qui prend les décisions, toutes les décisions chorégraphiques, tandis qu'une action chorégraphique  ou un évènement  chorégraphique, c'est une évènement qui chorégraphie. Sans nécessairement prendre des décisions, mais à proposer par sa présence, par la présence de l'évènement, des modulations qui eux endiguent l'information chorégraphique.

Donc c’est l’information même, les gens qui bougent, la présence des gens qui vont se promener autour de moi, qui deviennent danse, c’est l’approche des gens à mon corps qui devient danse. Au lieu de dire que la danse, ce sont que les mouvements qui sont faits pour les danseurs, ou les performeurs, pour moi la danse est beaucoup plus dans la relation justement, dans la relation vers l'autre, dans la relation d'un objet à un corps, un objet qui est stable ou un corps mobile ou, l'opposée, de deux corps mobiles entre eux; le relationnel est chorégraphique. Donc… et ça c'est quelque chose qui pour moi, que j’ai pu constater de façon répétée, de façon très… qui m'a donné des convictions chorégraphiques autres, de montrer que, chorégraphiquement, il y a d'autres éléments qui me fascinent très profondément, très fortement. C'est justement ça, c’est que le relationnel est chorégraphique, et que le relationnel [n’a] pas nécessairement avoir à être explicite dans le type de relation qui est là, mais qui c'est pas nécessairement que l'action chorégraphique est une action qui se fait en soi; c'est comme la chorégraphie nous provient, comme on est des êtres influencés et influençables par l'environnement avec lequel on vit. C'est évidement que l'environnement nous chorégraphie. Et c'est très différent ça, cette façon-là, des autres pièces, l'environnement. Avant, nous essayons  de démontrer cet affect, maintenant je ne suis plus nécessairement dans l’idée de démontrer l’affect, je suis beaucoup plus dans l’idée de directement adresser l'affect au lieu de le démontrer. Adresser l'affect de sorte que ce soit quelque chose qui se passe entre les spectateurs et les performeurs, entre le spectateur dans l'espace dans l’atmosphère du lieu performatif… il y a plein d’éléments qui, en fait, qui sont chorégraphiques auxquels on prête pas nécessairement attention, je pense, je suis plus usé de prêter attention à ces éléments-là.

JO - Presque comme de l’animisme ?

BL - Oui, presque, on pourrait dire. En fait, ce qui m’intéresse, c’est de retrouver les sources de la danse, de rappeler les sources de la danse. Pas nécessairement dire que la danse est comme produit, la danse n’est pas un produit; la danse est une nécessité. Et puis cette nécessité-là, (c’est juste maintenant presque une question de vie) ou une façon de percevoir comment le mouvement, en fait, que cette chorégraphie de l’environnement, comment est-ce que l’environnement nous affecte, comment est-ce que l’affecte n’est pas juste créer par une volonté, mais créé simplement par la présence. Et que cette présence-là et de la reconnaître, c’est de donner lien, de créer lien ou de reconnaître ce lien, c’est de mettre en mouvement cette force-là qui renforce ce lien. Et pour moi c’est quelque chose de plus importante qu’une démonstration chorégraphique d’une idée sur scène; je trouve que ça devient pour moi quelque chose de plus important.

JO - Parce que déjà dans Snakeskin, il y a l’étonnante présence d'une structure visuelle ressemblant à un utérus, comme un noyau. Émanant du centre de cette structure, des lignes se jettent vers la circonférence. Au centre de toute cette matrice, un seul corps entouré de lignes donnant l’impression de sortir de son corps. J’ai l’impression qu’il y avait déjà la tendance d’aller vers « la relation ». Peut-on dire ça ? Que dites-vous de Snakeskin. Quel était le but de cette pièce?

BL – Oui. Effectivement, Snakeskin tend beaucoup vers le relationnel. Mais c’est un dispositif frontal, c’est cela où est la différence. Le dispositif frontal qui est un dispositif performatif, mais à l’italienne et qui propose un peu les mêmes choses, mais dans un rôle de spectateur beaucoup plus immobile. Donc ce qui m’intéresse ici, c’est « c’est quoi la mobilité du spectateur ? ». C’est quoi le sens du spectateur, comment on peut... j’ai fait dans Snakeskin déjà; dans Lifeguard, je vais plus loin dans le relationnel et dans l’adresse aux sens, aux sensations.

JO - Issu de descendants Antillais, je suis très familier avec la colonisation. Est ce Dans une entrevue récente, vous avez parlé de la colonisation des corps. Je m’intéresse à cette idée de wildness (comme le suggère Pinkola-Estes dans son livre Femmes qui courent avec les loups). Plusieurs autres intellectuels comme Layla Abdel-Rahim ont souligné la mission « civilisatrice » comme écrasement d’un wildness important. Pourriez-vous parler un peu de cette décolonisation des corps que vous proposez ? Propositions de quelque chose de sauvage, de wildness, au lieu de quelque chose de civilisé ?

BL – Décolonisation oui, mais je trouve que les peuples soi-disant non-civilisés, de l’époque précoloniale, étaient des peuples que je trouve socialement très évolués, avec des structures sociales très fortes. Leur relation à l’environnement était très puissante. Dans l’acte de colonisation, il s’est établi des ruptures avec l’environnement qui ont été très violentes, et on était détachés… la rupture avec l’environnement c’est faite de façon assez radicale et continue. Pour moi, la décolonisation, c’est rééduquer le corps à être en lien. Rééquilibrer et réindiquer le corps parce qu’on a été indiqué à séparer les choses. Donc je pense que… ce qui était important de moi, c’était de re-questionner ça, ou de questionner de façon très active que c’est le lien qui a été brisé avec toutes les notions du corps avec l’environnement, c’est souvent ce qui a été…  c’est aussi la définition de ce qui est sauvage, la définition colonialiste de sauvage est hyper péjorative, et c’est pour ça que j’hésite un petit peu à utiliser le mot sauvage parce que le colonialisme a toujours nommé les sauvages, le mot sauvage comme quelque chose de  hyper péjoratif. Et ça c’est quelque chose que je trouve aussi qui était aussi d’une violence extrême. Mais là je dis… en anglais, going feral. Oui, je trouve que c’est un mot, c’est un mot qui me plaît vraiment énormément, parce qu’il y a tellement de connaissances innées là l’animal humain, qui sont dans nos corps, qui sont là et que nous avons réprimés pendant des siècles et puis c’est de rééduquer ou de remontrer au corps que, encore, on vit dans ses connaissances. Il faut se rééduquer, il faut se réapprendre. Donc c’est un travail pour la danse.

JO - Vous parlez souvent de « somatisme » ; l’« approche somatique » est souvent citée dans vos entrevues. Pourriez-vous nous expliquer, de façon plutôt simple, ce que vous voulez dire par cette approche « somatique » et, aussi, comment va-t-on la voir dans Lifeguard ?

BL - On peut dire que l’intérieur du corps et les organes, ils ont la possibilité de, lorsqu’on éveille les sens, de s’étendre dans l’espace extérieur du corps énergiquement. L’étendue se réplique à l’extérieur du corps donnent la possibilité de recréer du corps à l’extérieur du corps. Et c’est ce corps-là, à l’extérieur du corps, qui est en contact avec l’intérieur du corps qui crée du lien avec l’environnement, le lien avec les gens, c’est vraiment, c’est quelque chose de hyper physique. Et c’est cette hyper physicalité-là, elle n’est pas nécessairement une des choses qui ont été brillées avec le colonialisme de façon extrême. Ce contact-là, c’est la capacité du corps d’être à l’écoute et d’être en lien avec. Et donc pour moi le travail somatique, c’est ça. C’est réapprendre au corps à être en lien avec. C’est ce travail qui pour moi est essentiel et c’est ça qui, et ça me fait complètement questionner tout ce qui a trait à comment la performance, le spectacle a été développé dans un système qui, en fait, a rétabli les mêmes valeurs que le colonialisme a mis en place. Il y a un genre de cercle vicieux inconscient qui fait que les choses se reproduisent, et se reproduisent aussi au niveau du spectacle. Le spectacle n’est pas totalement exclu de ça, il fait partie du système aussi. Donc ce que je me pose comme question, c’est : au fait, qu’est-ce qu’on a perdu socialement, mais qu’est-ce qu’on peut retrouver aussi et travailler là-dessus. C’est un processus qui prend du temps et qui fait poser énormément de questions, parce que lorsqu’on perçoit ça, les choses qui nous arrivent, des sensations nouvelles qui passent par nos corps; il y a des états de conscience, des choses qui se manifestent auxquels on n’avait pas nécessairement accès auparavant. Donc ça amène beaucoup de questionnement…

JO- Dans Before We Go, un des moments les plus touchants est celui lorsque Meg Stuart serre dans ses bras cette femme au bord de la mort. En fait, il me semble que c'était la première fois qu’elle avait touché cette femme dans leur chorégraphie. Dans l'article « Lifeguard, de Benoît Lachambre » publié en juin 2016 dans la revue en ligne  A bras le corps  par Smaranda Olcèse- Trifan, l'auteure mentionne (et je cite) : «  Le performeur, reconnu pour une approche de la danse profondément nourrie par des processus somatiques, nous encourage à le toucher. Pression attentionnée mais insistante ou caresse furtive, exercée la paume ouverte ou du bout des doigts ». Pourriez-vous nous parler de Lifeguard et de la pratique du toucher ?

BL – En fait, tout s’adresse, d’une certaine façon, au toucher et aussi au toucher sans toucher. Dans Lifeguard, j’utilise différentes façons de conscientiser… une des choses qui se développent dans le travail somatique, c’est de toucher sans toucher. Donc c’est de réussir à… on éveille la conscience de ce toucher sans nécessairement toucher. Mais je travaille aussi avec le toucher direct aussi, dans Lifeguard, parce que je pense que c’est très intéressant de pouvoir demander ou offrir aux spectateurs qu’ils touchent mon corps, pour que dans le mouvement que mon corps a pris, qu’il y ait une transmission de mouvement qui se fait de façon tactile.  Donc il y a une partie du spectacle qui se fait de façon tactile, une partie du spectacle qui est tactile. Et ce qui est aussi très intéressant avec le toucher, c’est de voir comment les spectateurs arrivent à me toucher. Quelles sont leurs présences lorsqu’ils touchent, lorsqu’ils s’approchent pour toucher. Quels sont leurs positionnements lorsqu’ils observent quelqu’un qui est un train de toucher; est-ce qu’ils ont un intérêt, comment ils sont « touchés » émotivement ou pas touchés ? Tous ces différents degrés du tactile ou non tactile qui sont toujours à faire avec la tactilité même s’il n’y a pas de contact physique direct. Je trouve différentes façons, différentes méthodes pour pouvoir justement adresser ces qualitatifs-là.

JO – Dans mon article sur votre dernière pièce – Hyperterrestres, présentée lors du FTA 2015 –, j'ai souvent mentionné l'idée de fusion, une idée qui est évidente dans cette pièce. Avec Lifeguard je coupe le mot en deux : LIFE GUARD. Dans ces deux sens du mot, j’ai pensé à l’idée duchaman... Y aurait-il peut-être des échos de la quête chamanique dans cette pièce ou, autrement, quels seraient vos intérêts dans un tel sens ?

BL – Effectivement, oui. Pour moi le chamanisme est très important. C’est pas nécessairement étudié, mais je me rends compte que le travail somatique, et quelque part que le chamanisme est complètement dans les pratiques chamanistes. Peut-être que ce qu’on fait, c’est d’essayer de retrouver de façon contemporaine/corporelle/actuelle le chamanisme. De réintégrer ça à l’intérieur des corps contemporains, de pouvoir retrouver ce lien-là. Pour moi, oui, tout à fait, effectivement… et c’est encore beaucoup inscrit dans de cultures à des niveaux qui sont… le travail chamanique est inscrit à beaucoup de niveaux dans plein de cultures qui sont pas nécessairement les cultures colonialistes, les cultures qui sont colonisées énormément de présence du chaman, dans la culture. Et ce qui je me rends compte en faisant un travail somatique, c’est que je suis hyper lié au chamanisme, sans être nécessairement un chaman. De cette façon-là, il y a un appel qui se fait au chaman, parce que je trouve que c’est énormément de connaissances qui sont véhiculées par le chamanisme au niveau de tellement forte et le contact du corps à l’esprit qui est absolument merveilleux. Mais ça c’est quelque chose que je fais de façon un petit peu ludique, parfois j’utilise le ludisme aussi pour m’approcher vers [la spiritualité]… parce que c’est un processus qui est plus facile pour moi de véhiculer… si j’utilise le ludisme, mais ça peut tout à fait de même détourner. Si j’utilise quelque chose de ludique, c’est plus facilement détourné vers le spirituel. Donc c’est de jouer entre le ludique et le spirituel, de voir qu’il y du lien là-dedans aussi qui existe. De cette façon-là, je cherche un peu, je cherche mon chemin. Et c’est un processus qui prend… donc oui, pour moi, c’est sûr que le chamanisme est quelque chose de fort; il y a beaucoup de rituels que, effectivement, que moi je sais pas du tout pratiquer. J’ai quelques visions, mais j’ai pas pratiqué. Il y a énormément de choses que j’ai jamais faites, mais le travail somatique en soi, je me rends vraiment compte qu’il est un façon…

JO - Dans plusieurs villes occidentales, la consommation récréative (par exemple, dans les clubs) de certains médicaments sacrés comme peyote (1) deviennent à la mode. Pensez-vous qu’il y aurait des aspects du chamanisme qui deviennent un peu dénués de leur sens avec une telle marchandisation ?  

Benoît – Je veux pas porter de jugements, mais c’est sur que c’est quelque chose de… Pour trouver quelque chose, il faut mettre le temps aussi. Souvent si on n’a pas le… peut-être qu’il y a quelque chose qui énergétiquement peut être négatif… à utiliser des substances pour aller en boîte, des substances chamaniques sacrées. Quelque chose qui est pas nécessairement à 100% conscient dans le travail. Je sais pas, comme je n’ai jamais fait le peyote, je n’ai jamais utilisé, je sais que le travail somatique c’est la référence que j’ai au fait. Le travail somatique nous met dans un état second qui sont très fort, qui peuvent être très puissants, où les notions de réalité se transforment. Donc il n’y a aucun produit chimique qui est ingéré ou produit, qui est hallucinogène, ou un produit qui va servir pour nous mettre en transe autre que la respiration ou le travail des sens ou le travail énergétique… donc de ce côté-là pour mois c’est quelque chose de très… ça m’étonne aussi, à chaque fois, comme on se trouve un peu toujours comme un enfant… l’émerveillement d’être… un peu comme être pris par la transe, pris par la transformation, de différents niveaux de réalité, une sensation du réel. C’est juste qu’il y a certaines couches de réalité que je nomme dans mon travail et ma vie quotidiens, lorsque je fais des pratiques somatiques… et ça commence… la barrière entre le réel  devient autre. Ça c’est très intéressant, il n‘y a pas nécessairement aucune prise de substance, et le lien à la substance se transforme, le lien à qu’est-ce que ça veut dire, le corps commence à connaître autre chose. Ça reste aussi de traces dans le corps, si on commence à éduquer de cette façon-là le corps, il commence à sentir les choses de façon différente et on peut y accéder de façon… plus facilement après.  

JO – Moi, ça m’intéresse cette idée de … tu connais le mot anchor ? On parle beaucoup d’ondulation, de mouvement, de choses floues, et dans cette pièce Lifeguard ou, en général, est-ce que tu peux parler de cette idée ?  Parce que quand j’ai pensé à ta pièce et à ce que le monsieur a écrit, il a écrit, il a cité : « les mains agrippées au bâton de serpillère qui s’érigent comme un axis mundi au cœur d’un espace sans qualité ». Il parlait de quand tu as le balai dans tes mains. Si vous commenter cette idée d’anchor/ancrage…

Benoit – Je répète sans cesse le mot somatique, mais dans la pratique que je fais, je travaille énormément sur l’ancrage. Et comment l’ancrage, comment est-ce qu’on sent dans le sol avec le pied, ou même avec le plancher, comment est-ce que le relationnel au sol est constamment en mouvement aussi ? Et à l’intérieur du sol aussi, comment est-ce qu’on centre ? Pour moi ca devient quelque chose de hyper substantiel, mais le mouvement terrestre, mouvement tellurique, fait partie du corps aussi. Effectivement, si on crée du lien avec le corps, on crée du lien aussi avec l’ancrage. C’est nécessaire, pour avoir un lien fort à l’environnement, de s’ancrer aussi. Et je pense que dans la pièce, souvent ce que je fais aussi, je travaille sur l’extérieur de la plante des pieds, l’extérieur du pied comme des petits orteils, des talons. Je travaille beaucoup… je prends des chaussures qui me font balancer beaucoup, mais je travaille énormément sur l’extérieur du pied, ce qui permet d’ouvrir la force pelvienne et puis de travailler sur la relation pelvienne et plancher. Donc comment est-ce qu’on peut à la fois ouvrir la relation du bassin au sol et aussi donner à l’intérieur des jambes une tactilité, une mobilité qui permet de travailler sur l’énergie entre le sol et le bassin. Oui, mais pour moi ça veut dire quelque chose de hyper palpable. C’est des sensations qui sont tellement fortes que ça devient hyper réel. Pour moi, c’est le corps qui se met lui-même à fonctionner dans le relationnel, qui centre, qui va travailler sur ses mémoires ancestrale, mémoire reptilienne, mémoire végétale, c’est travailler à différents niveaux aussi. C’est un monde qui est tellement vaste…

Il y a plein de différentes possibilités… comment est-ce que le corps rayonne, c’est exponentiel. C’est d’observer ces possibilités-là… donc les choses se font surement sur place. Les choix se font sur place. Le corps est graphiquement… établir un mode de fonctionnement qui permet d’adresser l’espace de façon malléable.

In 1973, the Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka, made formulations around (‘surrounding’) the boundaries of body - movement- existential - scaffoldings. His essay, The Fourth Stage, had as its trajectory an attempt to move the reader up the rungs of (a) psychical ladder(s), beyond the normalized purview of "general aesthetic theories" (of such ladders). Soyinka spoke of "the persistent search for the meaning of tragedy".  Soyinka spoke of a need for a "redefinition (of the meaning of tragedy) in terms of cultural or private experience", and he underlined the need to look anew at how we see/ how we consider liminal experiences (limit- experiences), "man's recognition of certain areas of depth-experience which are not satisfactorily explained by general aesthetic theories", and that within such acute folds (foolds) (’experiences’) of what "we vaguely define as 'tragedy' " , may be a "voice that bids us return to our own sources".

Of course what one's sources may be could be / might be/ could be a debate up for debates - cultural, personal history, patria (one’s ‘fatherland’/ motherland). Of course, in Soyinka,  one could suspect a meaning as something suspiciously in the realm of the primordial when (speaking of one's own sources) he spoke of returning to "our own sources", something skeletal, something bare like a tabula rasa, something not heeding to something or prescribing to something , something/ an approach to looking at tragedy/ theatre/ movement, perhaps/ rather with the proportions  of bare scaffoldings/ a bare scaffold. An approach of a stripped down type/ a  ‘modal space’ / stripped down modules,  (where flesh might have once hung/ clung  to the bone) . And such a stripped down approach as  key in understanding/ "the key to human paradox, to man's experience of being and non- being”.

A gruesome stage with distressed walls. The inside of a manor of past great glory. A "great house", as it were. This great house has something of a rootedness, something of an invasiveness especially after the incident. The house with the vines that will soon overrun it, the detritus state it will soon be in also being the detritus state its two inhabitants will live with it.

There are many stories of "great houses" in literature, painted in the idiom of modernist horror: Julio Cortazar's short story "House Taken Over" or the ironic dilapidated  manner of a mansion of the Kennedy family in the film Gray Gardens,  or again to stay with the idiom of the tragically morose,  the phantasmagoric mansion in Ingmar Bergman's Hour of the Wolf. All with their dilapidated surroundings and desperate lives - apocalyptic apostasies - where searching for "meaning" becomes a life and death contract till the inevitable tragic end. There are many instances of the creepy mansion with the existential reverberations of its inhabitants - the mansion as entity,   entity with an enveloping presence, with an animate character that just takes over the very beings it is supposed to simply house.

Apocalyptic apostasies are on display in Love U Lovecraft, on at Théatre La Chapelle. The director, Stacey Christodoulou uses HP Lovecraft's torrid universe -  a wrecked New England farm Mansion as their jumping off point, embodying past memories of the past glory of life at the mansion/farm through poetic filled monologues and floating asymmetrical dialogue. It begins with a scene of the French speaking characters (who will narrate in the present the past incident)  involved in each trying to bag the other's head, like something out of Michael Haneke's film Funny Games.  They will be the narrators of the story of the Gardner family and how their lives slowly disintegrate and literally decompose after a meteorite hits their farm mansion/ manor. The play closely follows HP Lovecraft's The Color Out Of Space and the story of the life of the Gardners after a meteorite hits their farm in Arkham, New England:

"…tangle of glens and slopes too much silence in the dim alley… little hillside farms;

sometimes with all the buildings standing, sometimes with only one or

two… tumbled bricks and stones of an old chimney and cellar on my right, and the yawning

black maw of an abandoned well…" HP Lovecraft

In Love U Lovecraft,  the French narrators will tell the story, be accompanied by a ghostly figure who might be the Ammi character of Lovercraft's original story who was the last man standing after the Gardners (husband, wife, and kids soon succumb to the strange otherworldly radioactivity of the meteorite), and then also be accompanied by the Gardners (husband and wife).

Stacey Christodoulou makes a faithful attempt to tell the story of "how to put this house to rest" after the meteorite strike; first the livestock getting sick, the plants withering, and then the protean inhabitants sooner or later becoming part of the "blasted (smoldering) heath"  the meteorite has created. (the Gardners returning to "primal earth'). Reading Love craft's original story - there is a clear line of disintegration and  the recuperation of trying to find "meaning" in what is happening after this colossal disaster. In Lovecraft's original story, there is also a strong line of narrative (story) of finding something beyond the gray matter and the blasted smoking heath the meteor has left in its wake.

Love U Lovecraft  takes on a difficult story to represent on stage. Stacey Christodoulou's actors  present passionate poetic compressions which give you the dark dusk feel of Lovecraft's story but as spectators we are at times taken away from the line of action by certain dialogues done in "period" (earlier century New England)  language which for some might appear as exposition. At times there may be too much going on stage with continuous shifting scenes and shifting characters, which at times might lose us in something we have latched on to, like the beautiful French character's descriptions. The madness that Miss Gardener succumbs to in the catastrophe of her house being decimated and their seemingly being stuck in the disaster is a key thing in the play and one wished that more of her madness was shown more through just action (body movement)  rather than with the words that accompany the action. This was a very hard role to carry for anyone (the sort of role a Tilda Swinton or Nicole Kidman via "Dogville" or the recent  "Strangerland" might do). One could feel the great power of the actress in the role but but we seemed to not have the essence of madness' energy which is an at  a once constant battle between being all powerful (delusional or not)  and being nothing (vulnerable)- to show more of how madness' energy is not just a rush of energy but at once a consistent wilting, just as the house and its surroundings are going through after the meteorite strike, as in Lovecraft's story. Miss Gardner's madness to be developed in the denouement more through action, movement, and silence. The use of New England early century period dialogue by the actress playing  Miss Gardner, at times felt a bit staid and over dramatic.

One might have wanted to see more muted movement rather than excess dialogue to portray much of Lovecraft's universe- the madness, the tragedy, and the possible that might be left- all that is part of the "strange days", of this incident, as he describes it. A prime example of this kind of masterful use of blocking and muted movement to portray complex story,  took place in the recent mini masterpiece Untied Tales: The Vanished Power of the Usual Reign - acted/ danced by Clara Furey and Peter Jasko.

Again In Lovecraft's original story, there is also a strong line of narrative (story) of finding something beyond the gray matter and the blasted smoking heath the meteor has left in its wake:

"On an anvil it appeared highly malleable, and in the dark its luminosity was very marked. Stubbornly refusing to grow cool, it soon had the college in a state of real excitement; and when upon heating before the spectroscope it displayed shining bands unlike any known colours of the normal spectrum there was much breathless talk of new elements, bizarre optical properties, and other things which

puzzled men of science are wont to say when faced by the unknown."

Stacey Christodoulou has rightly portrayed the grayness but to portray that object that glows and resides after meteorite crashed might bring something other than just the destruction and destitution, "realms of infinity beyond all Nature"/ "it glowed faintly in the light". As  its evinced of another region beyond the gray matter in Lovecraft -

"It was the coroner, seated near a window overlooking

the yard, who first noticed the glow about the well. Night had fully set

in, and all the abhorrent grounds seemed faintly luminous with more than

the fitful moonbeams; but this new glow was something definite and

distinct, and appeared to shoot up from the black pit like a softened

ray from a searchlight, giving dull reflections in the little ground

pools where the water had been emptied. It had a very queer colour"

To show the such,  more silent theatralization might be key to understand more of  the secrets (good and bad) of the "strange days", not just that which is morose in the meteor crash and dilapidation of the "great house"  but also the scintillations that are intimated- the phosphorescent glow of the "thing" that remains after the meteorite crash). Stacey Christodoulou does pull something out of Lovecraft which is very interesting - a kind of earthly pact  and credo which dying really is - from the primal earth and back to it. After, all the queer death cries that the Gardeners lived through in Lovecraft's strange story, there was always the assurance, one would hope that they might after it all, return to the primal earth, as Stacey Christodoulou's Love U Lovecraft smartly points out.

Brief Notes on the Performance  Untied Tales - The Vanished Power of the Usual Reign  March 15 2016 - Arsenale, October  27-31, 2015 - Théatre La Chapelle

“This piece, as poetic as dark, unfolds like a defeated tale. It addresses the meeting of the other and of his great suffering and great wonders. A hallucinogenic world where one is never as alone as he think and where what the eyes do not see, exists. A constant sense of urgency. Hands up, for the trance, for the drum, yes, for it leads us to our final destination … where we know we’ll know nothing. “

Clara Furey/ Peter Jasko

Thus there exists a body that is not the one that you see in the world, but rather an invisible originary body that is identified with what I am, that walks, that strikes, that accomplishes all my actions…For it is this primitive knowledge (of the hand itself)  (and not what it touches) that enables me to move it….The essence of this originary corporeity is life…”

Michel Henry

“Build a fort, set it on fire!”

Jean Michel Basquiat

(Spoiler Alert)

It starts with a not so enchanted forest. Two bodies. A vast but limited expanse. Collide, fall, collide fall, glue to me, you to me, glue, glue, glue you glue me, i glue (to) you.

To fall is to learn they say, to fall is to learn they say, fall, walk, fall walk “deborder deborder” two bodies. She is strong. Wait, they start together. They are curled up together (“coller”) Ineffable - the true silence at the beginning of forests. SHHHHHH. No it is not imposed. But somehow you know to shhhh, the shhhhh is there.

They come out of their sleep like two pharaohs… Do not say, don’t breathe- just watch.Their curling out is snail- like effervescently shhhh. The nice glides of one body into another. Curled like two sides, two things curled into each other.  Yes you into me, me into you. Ok let’s unfurl together, Let’s see the “world” together. Let’s uncurl. Let’s stay in each other. Let's move slowly out of each other (after love) after the love.  You,me curled into you, me. Spooning people call it , one curled into the other like The Eternal Lovers of Valdaro-  “the two 6000 year old skeletons interred facing each other with arms around each other, thus reminiscent of a lover’s embrace.

Becket says -“two white bodies, each in its semicircle” /“the white ground into two semicircles” Two crescent moons…A complementarity between two bodies -‘I am so happy they start this way’.

And then there is (always is) (the game of)  Hanged, be hanged, hanged be hanged, hanged be hanged… let’s  play hang man …The Lovers of Valdaro, the skeleton couple stuck in an eternal embrace: ‘Le flambeau que je portes, le flambeau qu tu portes- nos flambeaux” (they might say).

A junkie couple navigating the spheres together.  Under the skin- inserted under the skin- both.  Boes and Lena. Disappearing into each other. “No trace anywhere of life” (Beckett) you say, pah, no difficulty there, imagination not dead yet, yes, dead, good, imagination dead imagine. Islands, waters, azure, verdure, one glimpse …Till all white in the whiteness the rotunda. No way in, go in, measure.“ (Beckett)

Then the two will go measure their surrounding. They will: ‘Press the wall’. Bowing, forced bowing (the two ) forced to the usual power. Her  at wall, him at floor. The horizontal, the vertical. She seems stronger.  Hands up like Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus. Punch self. Put your whole mouth around/ on his face. Suckle him.

New signs, new ideograms. We are children of god, after all but stuck in these Untied Tales. Not so much stuck but at times gliding through them. Turn into each other. Blow onto each other. Be onto each other. ‘Build a house‘. Build it together. Drag her she has fallen. Make the home. “The tonics of wildness” (Walden) Carrying him, their (our) smile. Signs taken for wonder. ‘Epuiser’ (exhausted). Both ‘epuiser’ (exhausted).

Now: Erase the lines of this house, set it adrift. “Built a house, set it on fire.” ‘That is softer. Just simply blow on the house you have built and watch it float away. But you can  float with it also. ‘You two, yeah you two.’  Yeah I’m talking to you. (Deniro)’  

‘My god will we end up as such a conventional couple.’  ‘We can be like the "Lovers of Valdaro’, like the ‘Lovers of Valdaro’. "By the way, this is how we started - that is after we lied down curling together, into each other, spooning into each other.  (‘la cuilliere’).

Wind bringing you down, then. Lying on the ground "two white  bodies, each in its semicircle”  (Beckett). The glory of two bodies. The eternal shining of the spotless mind. Ultimately (it is) an enchanted forest, it is all in a forest after all. We are “untied tales” in a forest after all! Untied tales! This is how we started.

And finally the silence of building upon the invisible, the ‘contourning’ ‘getting around it’/ moving beyond / testing (the limits of the “usual reign”). For we change, but we must ultimately stay where we are to see where we are going - these are the fugitive movements to be here and there- that is not the question.

It is the ontology of how/where/ how (not what) we go.The usual reign (of power and its relations) will fade.  

We must move into to borders of where we are.Splicing, extending, and stopping until we get there again - until we get there again.

Until we get there where we are -(in) “the vanished power of the usual reign”, yeah that is it, -(in) “the vanished power of the usual reign”.

The Impossible III by Maria Martins , 1946

ROMEO AND JULIET IN THE ANTHROPOCENE AGE - A REVOLUTIONARY ROMEO AND JULIET IN  FINAL DAYS AT THE HOTEL CALIFORNIA: A Review Catherine Gaudet and Jérémie Niel’s La Tres Excellente et Lamentable Tragédie de Romeo Et Juliette 13- 17 January Usine C

“On the side of the hills suddenly it is the very expanse which launches the chariot into its wonderment in the cicatrices of the cane (sugarcane) , always in the black tibia the water proclaimed red so many times by the touch of my voice Here, the resurgence of my bounding in the stride from the quick tempered depths of the glades but also the leafy high priests of my patience  ah yes I only want the last voyage of my lassitude as proof between the dry leaves and the foam the flowering of the islands, the foamy geography of the islands on the open seas’ stomachs our songs, our foreheads barred from origins our feet stuck in the tempests the cutting, the cutting of your long gesture of the aurora where the birds look in vain to perch between the mesh of the drums despite me the overturning of the earth The side of the winds in contestation the weight of shoulders in the scintillation the nights employed for the night.”  - Edouard Glissant

“Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs.” 
― William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

It (La Tres Excellente et Lamentable Tragédie de Romeo Et Juliette) starts out with a bang,  and rather moreover here with a set  of poetic bangs - all of the following poetic words (furies) throughout the play really are all infused into the stretches of the silent (that we witness) in the scathing small dance fragments; the poetic words (-furies) are also all infused into the scars of the roaring-screeches of Juliet and Romeo played by Clara Furey and Francis Ducharme,  with their in-roads into the irreverent (at times playing on aspects of the phatic nature of  our contemporary advertising type of world ) but never losing the eternal classicism/ elegance of the piece (R&J), and with the play’s “skid row flash pans” of the sacred and of the profane -  that are the specific brand of this here Niels’ and Gaudet's Romeo and Juliet.

La Tres Excellente et Lamentable Tragédie de Romeo Et Juliette is couched in a Hotel California (1) circa now, not unlike had been Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe or Sid and Nancy back then at the Chelsea Hotel, or perhaps like the solitary yet multiple (2) Valerie Solanas after trying to kill Andy Warhol, in her final days at the Bristol Hotel in the Tenderloin District of Sanfrancisco. Niel’s and Gaudet’s skid row (Romeo & Juliet) lovers, live at the edge of time (3). And also like many other“skid row”demonlovers, Clara Furey and Francis Ducharme incant many other “skid row demonlovers” (4) beyond Romeo and Juliet like Beckett’s Hamm and Clov (Endgame)or  “lovers of valdaro” -the skeleton couple found in an eternal embrace Mantova, Italy, or the South African Playwright Athol Fugard’s couple Boesman and Lena eternally walking along the side of the road from shanty town to shanty town during apartheid.. And by “skid-row”, I am pointing at something liminal, something other than a status quo sentimental union between a couple; what is meant is skid row (in Los Angeles especially) being the last stop, at least in this normalized lifetime. Niel’s and Gaudet’s Romeo & Juliet plays very much on this being the last stop for the couple they portray, and actually it could be said Niel’s and Gaudet then offer the Romeo& Juliet they portray “one thousand other lives”; beyond their deaths, throughout the play Clara Furey is resuscitated and throughout the play Francis Ducharme dies a thousand lives only to be back again, breathing one unto the other.

And in fact in La Tres Excellente et Lamentable...,  (Clara Furey & Francis Ducharme ) might each be alternating  between playing the roles of Juliet and Romeo throughout the piece. And with Ducharme definitely having a lot to keep up with, with the always fierce Clara Furey, Ducharme stepped up to the plate and gave an outstanding performance that moved between the subtle, the iconic, and plain frightening madness as a Romeo full of incantations going beyond the confines of this hotel room.

As for Furey, as with every piece she imbibes, incredibly moving through the one hour show like a feral feline always lost, never lost, always on the brink of coming back, always finding something, always discarding that thing, to always find it again. The circle of life as always with this audacious actress-dancer - who could be considered one third lynx, one third epuisé cabaret habitueé, one third excited mystery guest on a future gameshow that has yet to be invented. There is something ancient in her movements, yet we cannot place it. There is something playful in her movements yet we cannot quite place it. There is something dreadful that lies light and distilled/ disturbing/ beautiful that floats around the stage of  Niels and Gaudet's Romeo and Juliet, almost like two humans (Romeo and Juliet) who having been lynched have come back to tell the story before that act which separated them, sent here to play to to replay all the other possibilities,  bringing us through all the motions, helping us to forget the rope that hung them, helping us to believe in some other kind of horizon, not simple sentimental love but something perhaps to do with some kinds of beautyful ones/ideas. states of being that are not yet born. The suction of Furey’s mouth to Ducharme’s mouth at the end of the piece gives us the signs of  the vacuum between the two (R& J), a (societal) suction which shreds, and with the caustic warnings of love better lived hopefully in another time, in another way, “love in the time of cholera”.  The detritus signs of our contemporary advertising world litter the “hotel room”/ stage and it is obvious that we must certainly find another way among all the detritus hanging about. The reduced stage set ( a hotel room we walk into) is a couple of meters away from us. We are invited to live in their house. An intimate performance, a “close” look into Clara and Francis, Juliet and Romeo.

Furey truly has set the mark for any young actresses/ actors who truly are ready to act with everything  coming equally from mind and body, in an embodied sense especially (Just see Jonathan Romney’s “feverish” article on  Guy Maddin’s fever dream 2015 film  Forbidden Room where Furey plays “several roles” as Margot)  The chameleon like chimerae that Clara Furey spews on stage was addictive and hypnotic, if not just right down scary and joyful, all at once.  There was her signature  hand motions that make swathes (come ) across her face, a sort of vertical wiping of the face and other hermetic hand gestures, like motions welcoming us into a/her secret society (see her in Guy Maddin’s Forbidden Room also). After Juliet has parted from her Romeo for awhile, Furey (playing Juliet or Romeo at that time) moves to the “hotel room’s” shower and through the vitrine we had first watched the early stilted and naked Romeo through, we now see Furey (Juliet or Romeo at that time) doing her signature moves and adding some new hand body fragmentation gestures to her ever growing dance vocabulary (see her last performance Untied Tales at Theatre la Chapelle). The moves she does in the hotel’s “shower” were  somewhere between the “waacking” and “something else”,  she and  Ducharme do many times in his screaming fits, trying to shake the “ancestral rigidity”, as they incant in one line among many other lines.  Earlier on, Romeo (Ducharme) had attended to the always falling ill Juliet (Furey) and performed an operation to try and “heal” her from her always feeling ill (‘j’ai mal). The operation does not work and they try and instead to move through other ways to usurp the world of family vs family, tribe against tribe - not welcoming the newly brought together Romeo and Juliet: “Two households, both alike in dignity In fair Verona, where we lay our scene From ancient grudge break to new mutiny Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean. From forth the fatal loins of these two foes A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life Whose misadventured piteous overthrows Do with their death bury their parents' strife.”

Instead they (this Romeo and Juliet) walk on the precipice (see Trisha Brown’s iconic 1970 performance Man Walking Down the Side of a Building )  instead of along the tried and exhausted route (of the ancestral rigidity), instead they scream and stir, instead they realize the ideal of “to be fucked or not to be fucked”, instead they do fragmentation dances (not whole dances), instead they wipe their faces (see Furey’s shower scene and signature movements mentioned above which moves like reading through the first chapters of the famous anthropologist Henri Van de Lier’s Anthropogenies which describes our first enterprise moving from quadrupeds  towards transversality), instead they (this Romeo and Juliet)  face the shame, admit themselves honestly into the bestial subterranean of love,  instead they horizontally not vertically, instead they resist elastically, instead they put their finger filling their respective mouths to stop the further foaming (l’ecume) of an already failed civilization, instead they resist the ruins of a “Great House”. All this to renew with their wildness and move beyond the structures that bpth their families “live by” (de-legitimation of inveterate structures). This Romeo and Juliet seek to renegotiate their/ our relationship between our aggressivity and intimacy: 

“The body of Vertebrates, Mammals anterior to Homo in particular, made a distinction (a) between the front and the back, in the aggressiveness (ad-gredi, going towards) and the escape; (b) the bottom and the top, in the weight; (c) the dorsal and the ventral, in the repartition of their organs from their spine into a progressive intimacy (intimus, the most ‘intus'). These three sensory-motor dimensions (degrees of freedom) were reduced to the predominating dimension of predation (a): front-back, head-tail, mouth-anus, whose two other (b) (c), were subsidiary. In summary, the pre-hominoid animality is rostral, better still, caudal - rostral….Yet, when he stands, particularly when his arms and legs are spread apart, the body of Homo, the upright primate, spreads and first spreads a stable transversal plan. This vertical-lateral plan is stabilized from instant to instant by gravitation, whose field of force exerts and planes along the thin, upright volume of the trunk. Simultaneously, the dimensions of aggressiveness (back-front) and of intimacy (dorsal-ventral) confound, establishing a second plan perpendicular to the transversal plan used as reference.” Henri Van de Lier

Instead Juliet says to Romeo unravelling all those 99% structures the 1% need to see go:

O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo? Deny thy father and refuse thy name; And finally instead to live love as an echo-World (a world of connected “consciousnesses” not just between two but between many), not just as something reduced to itself, limited to itself. Perhaps Niel’s and Gaudet’s Juliet and Romeo are trying to make that contemporary journey (with much of the pain of letting go of the ancestral rigidity) to another plane of love or maybe some other form of relation.

The french word "enjeu" often used in its plural form "enjeux" has a naturally plural and complex texture to it. In "enjeux", one can describe a set of ideas, a set of conditions, the set of a "whole context of what is at stake", or even more within its complex texture, "enjeux" can be defined as “the games that are at stake". In that word, the plurality often comes in describing not one game, not one set of stakes, but the whole vista, the whole of what is at stake, the set and subset of games - in this case the games that make up the system of contemporary power and the way it is structured. This is precisely the means and ends of Marie Claude Poulin and Martin Kusch’ s latest dance theatre installation piece "Enjeux", at Theatre La Chapelle. Enjeux points at the offerings, the givings, the takings, the machinations, the complete workings, the "games that are at stake", within our present world, more particularly with an eye on the “games that are at stake”  within what some might consider our present world’s "manufactured lives" and in the very mode of manufacturing - looking at what had "once been", the assembly line, and now within what is now the world’s version of the “assembly line”,  and the present “assembly line’s” animate (1) "life"  and trajectories. 

Poulin and Kusch use and exploit "the life of"  the most banal everyday object used in the manufacturing world/ “assembly line” by such beacons of our contemporary world like Amazon- the all purpose heavy duty gray storage bin made by companies like Akron Mills and sometimes referred to as "round trip totes". These plastic storage bins can be seen everywhere from Amazon’s shelves holding the products on their way to a global market to being mini versions of large shipping containers. I am not sure if  a history of the container has been written yet, but it's importance with understanding our historical period  cannot be underestimated, especially when one thinks to our humble homo sapien beginnings of innovation, having as one of its most important “innovations” our ability to not just “break off objects”, but to compartmentalize and separate “things”.

As we see in Enjeux , the elegance of placing things into sections never quite leaves the more rough hewn activity of simply breaking things off. Enjeux starts with almost autorobotic beings caught in a graymatter field of these gray plastic storage bins. They are overbudenned by the bins, trying to reconfigure them but also at once tied to them and almost slave to the bins. There is the impression that there is a kind of attachment to the gray plastic storage bins - they hang on to them, labour to move them, and try and pull themselves away from them. One gets the impression of a group of automatons pleasantly licking frozen metals with real tongues, not caring about the outcomes of their tongues. I thought of a film like Michel Haneke Benny’s Video in watching this first section of all purpose followers of some sort of authority. After rummaging and laboring to configure the gray plastic storage bins, the automatons finally cease their activity, exhausted (“epuiser”). Notably Audrey Rochette really communicated the attachment of the beings to these objects, almost unable to let go of the gray plastic bins, almost in an erotic relationship with them. Some of the gray plastic containers shined with flat LEDs on their surface giving the stage the air of a neon graveyard. 

The next section brought the automatons back to their everyday lives as humans interacting with the (graymatter) gray plastic bins, but now with a sense of play, although the play, like that of children often came close to a terror filled one (see Haneke Benny’s Video again). Games like “go cart”, “make-a-building” and battle games permeated the stage’s world  of gray plastic bins, at times coming close to the violence children never see as violence but just as mishap (2) - columns of storage bins falling on unknowing victims, all as it were, as the saying goes, “it is all fun and games until…” (or is it?)

The next section was extremely creative in its use of video mapping to tell a larger story of the storage bin and its near cousin the shipping container. Here we began to understand the larger geopolitical implications with videos of shipping yards and sounds of the transport on oceans. One might of thought of the geopolitical video art piece the MAC recently acquired by Adrian Paci which tells the story of how one marble column makes its way from its white on white quarry in China across the ocean- the modes of transport and the life of what is being transported. In the next subsection, we saw Poulin and Kusch’s dancers (”movers”) crawling along the dirty floor among the now flatly laid out containers, perhaps mimicking a shipping yard,  as though they were the “lost crawlers” of Samuel Beckett’s Lost Ones or perhaps like comfortable digital worms mischievously miscreant among their digital forest. 

One got to really understand the allegory, the enjeux, and the geopolitical, if not existential implications of this contemporary object (”these packages”) (the gray bin)- its life(3), relations to “living” beings, and its ability to be transformed for better or for worse. Poulin and Kusch’s video mapping section ingeniously used animation to paint these pictures- animated illustrations of shipping containers on the storage bins, traveling and living the precarious life. The use of sound gave voice to the gray bin, highlighting its contexts,  and emphasizing the mysterious animacy of these objects and their global social and political context. The next and concluding section brought it all home with more video mapping again painting the existentialist dilemma of people and their relation to things. The videomapping now painted the disintegration using animated black holes on the dancers bodies as they moved and battled with the “hegemony” of the gray bins.  Perhaps some might have seen this dark message but other levels of interpretation definitely could be construed from this very well executed, choreographed, and designed dance theater performance whose use and arrangement of the gray bins made it an installation.  Kirstie McCallum from the Canada Council saw more agency among what could be seen as these crawlers lost in the the digital field of graymatter, “ I saw the dancers...more like catalysts for change, the towers of boxes began to look like information units that were interchangeable. I suddenly had the algorithmic metaphor in my mind of - boxes = data and dancers =agents of transformation. “ One could in that sense see the piece as a platform for transformation or at least as a platform for thinking through some kind of transformation. Whatever one’s take on Enjeux, there are the rapports between opposing elements like metal against skin, and as Poulin and Kusch have said in the performance programme, “In this performance, bodies and objects act like extensions and tools, but also like limits and constraints, one for the other. Between soft  and hard bodies, shell and flesh, operates an ensemble of games of roles, of  sculptural compositions and poetic evocations, mixing childhood and errancy in a global world to be reinvented. “ The rough hew against silk or silk against the rough hewn.

Ultimately these gray plastic bins could be much less than they actually are in this real manufactured world and be imaginatively recycled and imaginatively appropriated into a anti theology of  a contemporary animism. Can play be employed in the neon graveyard?

“Symbolic objects for adults like for children, the boxes of Enjeux, send us back to our way of playing a social role, across the spectrum of our functions, or simply our way of living (facon de vivre).” (performance programme) Thus in that sense the enjeux, may not have to remain the property of an authority, but perhaps can be ours to claim back, appropriate and transform:

“Each environment, its pieces, and their relations that deploy themselves constitute an enigma, a mystery to pierce, a space to understand....How to read a place...What decisions to make, what actions to do, what rapports to have....”  (performance programme)

(1)The strange, possibly even dark  “animism” that one might find within the machines of the contemporary machine manufacturing/ surveillance world can be partly be seen in the film Abenland, “Does the telephone effectively bridge the distance between two people, or merely underscore their estrangement? Abendland unsubtly provides ammo for both interpretations of man-made tools... Cameras, computers, and transportation systems become a hegemonic arsenal that anonymizes and manipulates victims, and yet the film’s own detached dualism also fades its human subjects into the background...” http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/abendland

(2) See recent confessions of US Military drone operators: http://www.sott.net/article/306793-Former-drone-operators-say-they-were-horrified-by-cruelty-of-assassination-program

(3) The filmmaker Quentin Dupieux has interestingly studied the life of objects like a rubber tire in his film Rubber. Yorgos Lanthimos has touched on a new kind of authoritarian animism employed by his father to his kids in his film Dogtooth. The “wall” around the house, in the film, becomes the “kid’s” brother. Objects in the house are also renamed since the kids are young adults who have never been allowed to leave the house. The father creates a theological regime of signs and play according to his needs to control his “kids”. 

“something “suspended between the mundane and the miraculous"

The first thing that has to be stated stated very emphatically, even before comments on the performance. In Sankai Juku, there is no literalism of presenting “a  traditional” japanese art -  butoh (the dance danced by Sankai Juku) being a 1960s post Hiroshima creation.  Butoh is somewhere between being not-modern and modern but it certainly is not traditional. It’s influences come from Europe and from the very original imagination of its 1959/1960’s Japanese creators in the context of a Japanese nation breaking away from its past. 1

Now,  preternatual is a strange word. Preternatural or in its even more obscure and visually appealing grapheme and old english form named aesc or ash-  æ,  praeternatural,  is one of those obscure words one might associate with a particular obscure writer like the 17th century physician, Thomas Browne.

The online Oxford would have -preternatual’s meaning as “beyond what is normal or natural”. The trusty wiki, citing Douglas  Allchin in his,  "Monsters & Marvels: How Do We Interpret the Preternatural”, would suggest “preternatural’s” being as something “suspended between the mundane and the miraculous". As it itself sounds and as I have always seen it, in my own estimation, it  has the meaning of something apriori, something of a notion of something before (nature), first in the sense, of a temporal meaning,  and then of something before nature, in the physical sense of something lying in front of , along, next to/ juxtaposed with nature.

Sankai Juku’s impact, presentation, and vision, can be summed up in that somewhat archaic word- preternaural- presenting an oeuvre along the equators of  the telling of nature’s beginnings, using its symbols, and trying to found hitherto unknown symbols / gestures of how we might have come to be in the present moment.   The preternaural impact and presentation they afford is in the twofold sense of them “showing” something lying before/ next to/ juxtaposed with nature, and especially in this latest presentation at The National Art Centre, Umusuna (Memories Before History) -  the notion of pointing at something existing before time and history as we traditionally think about it.

Sankai Juku’s latest offering Umusuna (Memories Before History) was recently at Ottawa’s phenomenal National Arts Center, built as a series of brutalist architectural geometrical hexagon forms. That is nothing to say of  Southam Hall, whose daunting beauty (those balconies!) reminds us at every moment that we are within a world class theatrical space.

In my last experience with Sankai Juku and their Kagemi: Beyond the Metaphors of Mirrors, almost 10 years ago at UCLA’s Royce Hall, I literally felt I had witnessed a reenactment of the Greek cult mysteries of Eleusis or something of that extreme secret and occult nature. The performance  evoked a sense  of a vision and feeling, as though I had witnessed some sort of creation myth or originary ritual - perhaps depicting the original breaths that made the wind and the red chalk drawn onto a not yet earth, that had become water, to put it in esoteric words.  That is Sankai Juku’s power - to paint imagined states of “stories” of creation and geneses. There are no interpretations of grand religious texts here, just the purest of totally imagined and visionary states (of Ushio Amagatsu’s choreography) used to paint (through dance) an entirely never before told tale of creation and geneses. The name of the group refers  to “the workshop of the mountain and the sea”. The elemental and the elements have always been key to Sankai Juku’s work, with previous pieces (since 1977)  using evocative words in their titles evoking the such, “The Egg Stands Out of Curiosity”, “Darkness Calms Down in Space”, “The Grazed Surface”, “In a Space of Perpetual Motion”, “Resonance From Far Away”, “Virtual Garden”,”A Moment in the Weave of Time”, “Two Flows”, “Beyond the Metaphor of Mirrors”, “As If In An Inexhaustible Flux”,  Common in all these titles is first the evocation of the elemental but also Sankai Juku’s ineffable mission to present an imagined  picture of what might have been the states of grace and terror  that were at the very root  of our planet’s creation - describing ideas of the possible "womb/s of space and time"/ space- time continuums (think of  the Hadron collider or perhaps of Homer's Penelope sewing at the loom), spans, the juxtapositions of the body to gravity ( they name their practice a dialogue with gravity), ideas of reverb, resonance, and flows.

Very rare is the hand gesture and stare that might tell an entire story. Ushio Amagatsu’s signature hip sway movement(dehanchement)2  and “stare into the void” were there. Amagatsu, founder and face of Sankai Juku opened the performance but before two vessels, shaped like one part each of an hour glass were placed above equidistant swing like apparati on the stage. One got the impression that there were proto typical time pieces. ,Sand has always played key part in Sankai Juku’s work. A waterfall of mist or sand then fell down from the rafters in steady streamed line for the duration of the performance. Amagatsu’ s figure then cut a swathe towards this bountiful streaming and flowing presence. One felt, however that this stream of sand or mist was not to be a necessarily “beautyful” bounty but an unsteady presence that only near the presence Amagatsu’s “character” could fully “embrace” this ethereal streaming presence.  The streaming vertical waterfall and the two equidistant swings with hourglasses were monuments to be reckoned with. The performance was sectioned off into seven sections, which I believe most Sankai Juku performances are (from the programme): Atoka Imprints All that is born Memories from Water In Winds Blow to the Far Distance Mirror of Forests Sedimentation and erosion, ad infinitum Ubusu

So that streaming waterfall and Amagastu’s character “just getting to know it” but not embrace it would have been part of that first section, Atoka Imprints. From ther the two equidistant hanging swings with hour glasses raised up and we were then treated to what this author saw as the following:

Priest like figures (see ancient , hands raised in sort of veneration or astonishment like the hands up figure in Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus painting or like the figure of a ram horns or many ancient depictions of synchronically moving holy men Circle dances (Sufis or entities before doing the such) Mouths agape (See Okui Enwesor’s intro essay to the Venice Biennale, “All the World’s Futures) Stages of mid-birth like pupa/ chrysalis Actions of prostration La semence/ semer (“Seeding”, sewing, reaping) Wadings through “Testings”/ “jumping ins” Building of reciprocities Births of musics Ceremony Establishing realms “Constituting life” Offerances Seeking radiances Psycho pathologies/ pathogens Touching it, pouring it on you Receiving (the waterfall/ the emulsion) “Disappearing into it all” (into the waterfall/the emulsion) New regions (nouvelles regions- See Edouard Glissant) “Walking to the edge of” Crawlings on backs Budding Afterlife The peripatetic Back to wholeness - ultimately

The entire inventory of this like any Sankai Juku performance bursts at the seams with such mimetic story telling. One might think to the animated gestures of an African griot, but here with Sankai Juku, all is couched within a profound depth of silence whose mime-like butoh dance, spins a tale to be unwound and unwound by the spectator, perhaps for years to come. But then again, unlike most contemporary art, a Sankai Juku performance might so impress upon a spectator  in the moment, that one might almost feel like there is almost a complete erasure as one leaves the hall of the dancers. Perhaps the secret of “the telling” (of the performance’s telling/ of the “story” told) might be sealed as we leave (the hall of the story of “the womb of our space and time”)  to return to the the hall of mirrors, so to speak of our contemporary society, and thus a necessary, as in “how in older times, when a person had a secret that could not be shared, he would instead go atop a mountain, make a hollow in a tree, whisper the secret into that hollow and cover it with mud” 3, to guard the secret. Perhaps as the Stoic philosopher Epictetus said, We “ought to approach these matters in another way; the thing is great, it is mystical, not a common thing…” 

As was always the case Sankai Juku dazzled and mystified, but one could not help wondering how Sankai Juku’s work still fits within our contemporary society (one would never dare say relevance since today we need all visions of the lost sacred we can get). Sankai Juku’s “not modern” 4approach is a welcome sojourn to the crass digital world but then one must ask how Sankai Juku’s vision before our anthropocene  age can properly inform and or perhaps modify itself to address its message to an audience that is very much in need of Sankai Juku’s  slow rumination on our collective and even individual “memories before history”. Shall they remain the same Sankai Juku or shall they venture into a modified territory? Now that they have grown and protected their message for so many years, would it be equally crass to dream of a collaboration one day between them and a more mainstream operator like the Cirque de Soleil. Imagine a world imbued with Sankai Juku’s slow incremental movements and reflection. One can only dream of such things perhaps. But then maybe they are two different creature to never be mixed. What is for sure is that we need “more memories before history”.

From the performance programme for Sankai Juku’s Umusuna:

  1.

NELLIGAN MAGAZINE (J.O)

Are your characters slaves or hero/heroines? Drugs use can be considered the success of a society trying to control its population. The drug user could in this other case be considered an example of what Foucault referred to when he spoke of how certain regimes teach us how to "control ourselves".

Nicolas Berzi (Artiste Inconnu):

A hero is always a slave at the same time, a slave of his destiny, of his passions. To be a hero always meant to fight and not getting overwhelmed by the weight of our deepest passions. Drugs is used to control and to escape, as much as it means to poison or to heal. In our society, drugs are used to control, and can be used by the subject to escape, and the control of drugs by the governors is a way to control the citizens. Yes drugs is a way of escaping from the control freaks of this world, but at the same time, it's a dangerous game, it can get so deep in your blood and brain that you can't escape from it anymore and the circle closes on itself. What interests me is the moment when the circle closes and that all the aspects of the question are crystalized in one single human tragedy.

2.

NELLIGAN MAGAZINE (J.O):

Now again taking the side of the drug user and looking at his or her universe form the inside, there is certainly a ceremonial side and a sense of contemporary rite/ritual to drug use. Think of the very deliberation of the drug user- the needle, the spoon. There is something ceremonial and ritualistic about it. We can see this in Antonie d'Agata 's film Atlas- certain moments of the light of the sacred and ceremony among drug users. A certain brotherhood or sisterhood among users. We can imagine a certain sacred ritual that exists among drug users. You spoke about this in just a few lines" L'aiguille qui rentre dans le bras..

Nicolas Berzi (Artiste Inconnu):

Yes drug using is ceremonial, ritualistic. It is the best part of it from my point of view. But at the same time, it is the moment you feel you will get liberated from your need of it, from your crave, when you visualise the liberation of the craving. I think that the brother/sisterhood of drug using, as always when we talk about drugs, can only be experienced, analyzed and judged in a complex perspective. When the good turns wrong, and the wrong turns good, when the liberation of the ritual becomes a slavery to others that provide to you the experience you need.

3.

NELLIGAN MAGAZINE (J.O):

 In Peepshow and Heroines, there is the theme of disappearance. In your last play, Peepshow, the narrator says, - "You were a passerby among passerby. You wanted to disappear into the crowd. " What is your interest in disappearance in contemporary society. One of the interesting allures of drug use is the sense of disappearing.

  Nicolas Berzi (Artiste Inconnu):

You have seen right ! Disappearance is something that fascinates me. How to disappear from the crowd, from the standards of our society without letting yourself disappear from its own destiny at the same time. How the hero in the contemporary scene is not a character anymore but still exists, in the shadow of this characterization by society standards. I think that to survive in this society of normalization and standardization, you need to be able to disappear without disappearing, to follow the unexpected roads without loosing yourself completely. This can be referred to (in) erotic consumption as much as drug using. Can you let yourself escape in those marginalised experiences without loosing yourself in their capacity to transform your braincells and destroy your life. We know that consumption and destruction are linked concepts and that in the drug and erotic consumptions there is a danger of destruction that can lead the subject to autodestruction. How too still be able to "escape" in this society, escape from the crowd, with experiences as deep as sex or drug, is something that fascinates me.

Photo Credit Gabriele Zucca

We are said to be living in the “Anthropocene” age. This age is said to start around the beginning of the Industrial Revolution . “Anthropocene” is essentially a not yet fully accepted geological term that refers to our “present time interval, in which many geologically significant conditions and processes are profoundly altered by human activities. These include changes in: erosion and sediment transport associated with a variety of anthropogenic processes, including colonization, agriculture,urbanisation and global warming...ocean acidification and spreading oceanic 'dead zones'. the biosphere both on land and in the sea, as a result of habitat loss, predation, species invasions.”

http://quaternary.stratigraphy.org/workinggroups/anthropocene/

Hofesh Shechter’s Sun plays to the tune of the story of the anthropocene age, “painting baroque fresco of a contemporary world full of tensions and hidden violence.”1 Hofesh Shechter present a brave new and critical world which does not preclude the gorgeousness of the sun.

The true arena of contemporary dance, with it’s larger vista than “just the dance”. In its contemporary form (contemporary dance) as  sites of “theatralization” and musical experimentation (total- song), operating at the nexus of not “just the dances”, but more often than not, contemporary dance,  operating in the modus of  an opera -tic baroque form. 2 This precisely what Hofesh Shechter’s recently performed Sun, at Montreal’s prestigious Danse, Danse 

From the Sun’s opening there is already sense of something internal/ interior / muted at work; through internal twists and turns - there is the  possibly brawny, possibly light, fleshy, hegemonic, dextrous, weak, playful, deathly, and yet with” the every once in a while” sporadic bright light of a literal sun shining (between scenes) on the ever changing, ever- morphing, ever crooked, ever delightful body of movements, and all it was describing.  Welcome to Hofesh Shechter’s (empire of the) Sun.

And it is precisely what Hofesh Shechter’s Sun  is describing that becomes contentious. Hofesh Shechter’s Sun  describes our proud (see: hubristic) civilization’s hocus pocus continual magic trick of colonization, consumption, production, taking all in, and regurgitating all that comes in our path, as if all that comes across, all that we could collect in the stream of our lives were the last meal: so to gorge on it totally or forever hold our peaces. Excess, and the non deliberation and simplistic dive usually attendant / employed in one’s relationship to excess, in our time, and the continual narcolepsy of a civilization on the brink of vomiting out its own charms. This is Hofesh Shechter’s Sun. Think of the magnaminous opening of the Quebecois writer Rejean Ducharme’s magnanimous opening to his novel  L’Avalée des Avalés (The Swallower Swallowed):

“Everything swallows me. When I have my eyes closed, it is by my stomach that I am swallowed. It is in my stomach that I choke. When I have my eyes opened, it is because I see have been swallowed., it is in the stomach of what I see that I choke. I am swallowed by the large wave, by the too high sky, by too fragile flowers, by the too apprehensive butterflies, by the too beautiful face of my mother”.

Photo Credit Simona Boccedi

Skirting the last line, one gets the idea of the total circumscription a civilization can become (“Oh, Anthropocene!”), in Sun. Think of Pasolini’s blackened comedy in his Salo. Think of the subtle Gargantua of Rabelais. And it is precisely at this register of the deathly (actually never too deathly) serious with the deathly comedic that Sun registers.

Arms aloft (like Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus) , Sun’s 18th century “courtly dances”  (The Guardian) were more irony than representation, more  “feral ballet” (The Guardian) than ballet; Sun was pantomime, and more total- carnivalesque (of glimpses of the opening of orifices and slights of signature horrifying smiles),  than a hubristic  evincing of a display of 18th century “courtly dances”. (See Ben Wheatley’s 2015 High Rise). 

Sun was delivered in a muted (silent) opera -tic baroque form,  with twists and turns where one could intimate one’s and the dancer’s own folding over of organs, as the terror of the story built “clearer and clearer”. But of course even with the pleasant feeling of a folding over of one’s moral organs (am I the wolf or the lamb? as in a bullfight, you must choose the bull or toreador), Hofesh Shechter’s Sun always came back with the reprise of dances and “songs of the glory of a God”, always tongue and cheek but yet so visceral, so immediate and shimmering in the dances, that one often felt a deep sense of a total unit of dancers dancing and not just a group of dancers.

A shimmering  small sea of perfectly synched dancers, in this “feral ballet” (The Guardian), Hofesh Shechter’s brilliant Sun, and the description of it as brilliant has real implications in the performance’s consistently shimmering golds, yellows,  and whites, among its 18th century “courtly dances” (The Guardian), which amounted at times to mere pantomime and at other like the total carnivalesque.  If one takes the literal meaning of carnival - carne vale - “to indulge in the flesh”, Hofesh Schecter’s latest offering, Sun, impressively represents  the modalities of human enterprise in all its darwinian drives, wears, joys, and tears, the very anthropocene drive that has left a permanent imprint on the planet, showing us in fact how WE have in fact indulged in the flesh almost to the point of gorging on it (see the movie La Grande Bouffe), all the while in a PC sarcastic way, the narrator pointing out to us, in the beginning and end of the performance, that  “no animal had been used or abused for the purposes of this show”

Hofesh Shechter’s Sun  cheekily opens with an announcement  showing a five second snippet of  a preview of the end of the piece. We immediately see snippets of a Rabelaisque lightly hubristic world where, as the narrator announces, “Here in the kingdom we know exactly what to say. You  will never catch us.” Who will not be caught- the oppressors or the oppressed?   At this point, all the shimmering of the preview dance and the collective dances to come, come with the air and smell -- of some sort of empire, some sort of body of empire seen in the --courtly dances --, which inserts itself as the “relegator” of some sort of ray of the commands of domination.Dominion, its dances and the seeking to find the very flesh that can twist within. One particular male solo does show that. 

Right away , we also are introduced to a sort of mute Master of Ceremonies who could be said to be a sort of administrator  cum delegate of whatever form of empire this may or may not be. We certainly are told that this is the old story of  --good and bad- and with the real introduction to this particularly strange yet familiar courtly scenes of what could be called the empire of the sun come with several dancers holding and dancing with oversized pictogram placards/ cardboard cuts outs  of many sheep and one wolf. Welcome to a shimmering exhilarating dance theatre piece that will very elegantly and perfectly execute, in one hour and fifteen minutes, the story of the age of the anthropocene3.

Photo Credit Gabriele Zucca Hofesh Shechter’s Sun is an attempt to extract something post colonial in how we talk about our colonial past but without the deliberate didactic.  “ Between shadow and light he creates an ambiguous space where beauty and evil coexist, where humour and sarcasm ease tensions.”4 In this collective dance of civilizations, we see first the slight dance of pictogram placards (see the use of placards in Melville’s novel Confidence Man) of the many sheep and one wolf, of the two natives and the wolf, and then in a swing of ultimate contemporaneity, of a non racialized young person with a hoodie and the wolf 5(the line of history’s flight is pretty clear).

“He (Hofesh Shechter) puts forth the idea of a social structure that, like the sun, can both threaten and benefit mankind.”. 6 Sun is therefore  about the undercurrent of a heart, the  undercurrent of a heart of a civilization and or/ set of civilizations. Without diatribe (until the end), the presentation of the dance sequences are more amorphous than narrative, more enveloping and overlapping than singular; a feeling of not wanting to know the narrative comes over the spectator, instead bathing in the light of the dances, and not so much the story, yet “they story” is always there, seething below- slight and distilled. If a narrative is to made out, one might have it that there is a “singular tribe....” subjected to...”the caprices of a Machiavellian master of ceremonies, a hollow character” very much the product of a society in search of meaning.”

 Moreover, what we see are various Candlebearers (see Giordano Bruno), within this empire of the sun,  rolling on the deep, so to speak. There is the Master of Ceremonies, a lone dancer, and a female’s solo - all moving through the conspiratorial schemas/ scaffoldings of history’s  silences, and intimating  the undercurrent “of the heart” all throughout. There is an electronic beat that returns like a pervasive chorus and after a while one might actually think it to be a kind of modified dark heartbeat.  

Ultimately with all the hijinx, arlecchinos, spirit/ed dances, and moving through the dark themes and the literal sun, that is sporadically seen on stage , (the “sun” no doubt of the title),  ultimately Sun is about facing history’s music (both the staccato and legato music) and dancing. “Let’s Face the Music and Dance”,  as goes Irving Berlin’s Americana classic, used in  a sequence of  Hofesh Shechter’s Sun.

Sun’s ending is not mere didacticism, as many critics have intimated.  A narrating voice expounds on what we as civilization have been party to: “We have taken the world by force. We have killed. We have invaded. We have burned. We have assassinated...” All truths, nonetheless.  Do these forward words simply dispel the shimmering elegant sequences we have just seen?  Is it not a brave and  necessary call to reflect,on the part of Hofesh Shechter, in what for the most part is a  high brow environment? Sun is the tale of many cities soaking in the machinations of post Enlightenment, the Industrial revolution and all that followed in their paths; necessary evocations of shrill cries of complicity, in a world not just on its brink, but  a world  many feel  on its last legs (see the daily issue of climate change). What after all are a few didactic words after sitting  through such shimmering elegance of allegory, irony, and collective thrilling movement.  Nice one Hofesh Shechter!

1 From the Danse Danse programme.

2 We are not far form Alain Platel’s Ballet C de la B, but then yes we are very far from Alain Platel’s Ballet C de la B.  Hofesh Shechter’s  universe is absolutely singular!

3 “The current geological age, viewed as having begun about 200 years ago with the significant impact of human activity on the ecosphere.”

4 From the Danse Danse programme.

5 Hofesh Shechter previously presented Uprising (2006) about the riots in Paris’ suburbs.

6 From the Danse Danse program me.