www.corpusweb.net - 24.09.2007
A choreography of disquiet
PERSPECTIVE #2: DEUFERT+PLISCHKE’S PREMIERE "REPORTABLE PORTRAITS" AT THE STEIRISCHER HERBST FESTIVAL IN GRAZ
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A woman
(dancer Hanna Sybille Müller) enters the stage and walks to the front while she
addresses the audience with her eyes. She has a soft smile on her face, then
relaxes her cheek muscles, turns inward, closes her eyes and bends forward. We
are right there with her, in that twilight zone in which sleep weighs upon our
eyelids, in which we are too tired to think and too restless to feel. Our
memories keep us half awake, half asleep, they postpone that pause in which we
can refrain from life for a while.
It is also
the space of Fernando Pessoa's semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares, an assistant
accountant who keeps a diary that we know as the many fragments of the
unfinished The Book of Disquiet. Soares maintains that writing is better
than trying to live. His notebook is a space of comfort in which he can embrace
the dream and contemplate the restlessness provoked by the haunting
impossibilities in which our lives are steeped. One of the things the solitary
space of writing can't eradicate though, is the existence of the others – that
is literature's fallacy: to think that the others are like us and would feel
like us. But writing can remind us of the fact that we are already many to
ourselves. A multitude of mutually strange people, who think and feel
differently, but cast a single shadow as they coincide with the single body – Soares' writing body.
Portraits
"Living is
knitting according to the intentions of others," notes Soares. It inspired the
German performance artists Kattrin Deufert and Thomas Plischke to develop a
poetics of knitting in their directory trilogy (2003–06). Their personal
memories were knitted into a narrative fabric, like an endless pair of tights
that holds a life together. No tights this time, deufert + plischke have
suspended their private mythology in the new group piece reportable
portraits, but Soares' poetics and disquiet mental space are omnipresent.
reportable
portraits departs
from a specific practice of formulating and reformulating. The movement
material is derived from a self-portrait danced by the five performers,
captured on video and analysed in writing according to a set of parameters.
These writings circulated in the studio and were reformulated by the others, a
repeated process in which personal memories and materials lose a clear source
and gain a more accurate form. As a shared diary, the notebooks involve both
writing and the others as a medium. It is a collaborative practice that
acknowledges the impossibility to dance or write one's own portrait without the
presence of others. This process finds an extension on stage: reportable
portraits proposes what we might call a ‘semi-heteronymic' choreography.
Not so much the heteronym of the ‘artist twins' deufert + plischke is at stake,
but the many doubles that populate the bodies of five people in a group
constellation.
So we find
ourselves with Hanna Sybille Müller and Bernardo Soares in that restless space
where sleep announces itself, but doesn't quite happen yet. Throughout the
performance, the other performers (Kattrin Deufert, Helena Golab, Thomas
Plischke and Benjamin Schoppmann) will join us in that space via many gestures
and postures that hint at sleep, from lying bodies to the blurry gaze lost in
dreams. Several audience members even take the invitation literally and doze
off – are they still there with us, in that plural singular space, or have they
withdrawn themselves too far? The sequences of reportable portraits are
interrupted by long black-outs, as moments of silence and rest.
Dips,
gaps, frictions
To what
extent can we portray ourselves and each other? Bernardo Soares doesn't
recognize himself in a photograph, finds himself appearing in a non-human way
and is embarrassed to realize that his colleagues find the likeliness between
him and the image striking – they seem to know perfectly well who he is! In reportable
portraits, the performers address each other and the spectators all the
time, they work with the mutual gaze as a gesture of negotiation. At the same
time, the performers are just looking for cues, as they repeat and juxtapose
movement phrases and dance the others' reformulated material. Although reportable
portraits makes use of pause and duration, the choreography is also thick
with flow and interaction. The performers have to wait sometimes to pick up the
others' cues, but embrace these dips, gaps and frictions deliberately. It allows for an exercise in socialisation
that is light and playful in the delivery, existential in its overtones.
reportable
portraits moves
away from deufert + plischke's hyper-formulated choreographic universe. Though
still a tightly written piece, the many hesitations and reluctances provide it
with a somewhat rough edge, which doesn't turn it into a live composition, but
reminds us that the social is not only a set of rules and representations, but
a series of practices. You don't see just performers but five people on stage,
with an awkwardness in their gaze and attitude that pairs practical concerns
with fundamental questions. And indeed they are different, they don't share a
common aesthetics or movement language, it is five different registers, five
different perspectives, five different realms of meaning. What becomes visible
on stage is the ghostly realm of the many doubles that multiply us through our
social interactions, that make us who we are, yet prevent us from coinciding
with ourselves.
Weather
report
The
performers have their tics and preferences, but their movements are no longer
quotidian in nature. Though clearly written and stylized, these movements
aren't become less idiosyncratic – they cover the body's surface, but resist
legibility. The movements take on an almost emblematic form, most obviously in
the gestural quality of the hands. Like antennas, fingers and hands stroke the
air lightly, or they explore spaces close to the body, shielding off the face
or the shoulder blades. The others have become a memory and a symbol here, but
also the sensorial is treated in a nearly ritual fashion.
These
condensed gestures are not unlike the many lengthy descriptions of the weather
in Soares' diary, which remind him of his body as a medium that absorbs
reality. Weather reports carry an eloquent idiom, they allow for a quotidian
ritual that embroiders narrative around the uncanny holes in our reality. Such
as this one question of life that stays hard to believe for Soares: also the
others do really exist. When they leave, we feel how their absence perforates
our own narrative fabric. Rituals of the sensorial accompany the realm of
disquiet, they frame the place of the other and the impossible outside view
upon ourselves.
Paradoxically,
it is in his writerly solitude that Soares keeps that condition and conflict
alive. So does reportable portraits. The five performers share their
portraits through the medium of semi-heteronymic choreography, they have
travelled from the intimacy of notebook and studio to the public space of the
theatre – a trajectory that is mirrored in Herman Sorgeloos' set design, which
is like a half open room on stage. The performance's concluding section
telescopes in the other direction, reducing a living practice of social
interaction again into an emblematic image. The five performers find themselves
in similar postures in one another's proximity, turned inward, their faces
covered with their hands. Five scripted bodies, withdrawn in themselves as
question marks, only half awake but not quite asleep, percolated by a
restlessness that won't cease to propel them into the intricacies of social
practice.
Jeroen Peeters
20/09 - 14/10/2007
steirischer herbst