MEDIATHEK

Schauet doch. Do look. What does Alexander Baervoets want us to look at? What does he want to show us, what does he want to make us see? [...] Baervoets wishes above all to show us a structure, wants to let us experience this succession of movements in space and time as a composition, a work of art with a compelling internal logic. He wants to show us his choreography of movements almost naked and rudimentary ' movement rather than dance, because complicated seductive virtuoso dance would divert the attention too much from his goal ' so that our viewing would not be distracted by superfluous theatricality and would be given the space the necessary to turn to itself in a mental duplication of what takes place here and now on stage. As the performance advances, or in other words as time passes, we increasingly realise there is something fateful in our looking, a tragic limitation, the impossibility of grasping the images here and now, the impossibility of penetrating into this membrane of movements, being increasingly thrown back onto the limitations of our recollections, our failing memory, fragments of images and memories that almost immediately infect and overwrite what we see and experience. It becomes increasingly clear that for Baervoets the movements are a means, a medium in which to examine and shape the notion of duration and the perception of duration, while at the same time, as the performance unfolds, an underlying emotionality, a hidden meaning, unintentionally develops, one to which we feel we shall never have access. As in earlier creations, Baervoets has left plenty of space for improvisation in his composition, his choreography, but one nevertheless senses that the main structure and the various stages and patterns are quite rigid and strict. Everything takes place along, over and via a single imaginary diagonal line from upstage right to downstage left. The dancers enter the stage one by one at irregular though quite long intervals and each in their own idiom of movement follows a similar walking route from right to left. Initially, the slowness and repetition with which this is done provokes a certain resistance, but the disorientation of our perception of duration and the experience of time also takes shape in this resistance, and you feel that your watching these repetitively moving bodies forces you to look at your own looking. In other words, what is happening on stage takes you to a mental zone where the looking can settle down and free itself from the exact passage of time on stage. It is also impossible, afterwards, to say precisely how long the performance actually took. The four dancers themselves occasionally introduce caesurae into this continuous, irregular flow by making adjustments to the sound installation or playing the overpowering sound of a foghorn. This caesura briefly stops all movement and drags the four performers out of their continuum, their perpetuum mobile, for a moment. [...] (This text was first published in the magazine Etcetera in Dutch. This is the English version of the original text) [Quelle: http://sarma.be/docs/1076] cru