MEDIATHEK

You don’t watch Myriam Gourfink’s Contraindre, you experience it. In a new performance by Cindy Van Acker and Gourfink herself in Nancy on 20 march 2007 – with music by Kasper Toeplitz and Laurent Dailleau – the work totally overthrows the classical performing frame-works. The space is no longer dual, divided by a line separating those intended to see and those intended to be seen : if the term wasn’t losing its meaning we could say that in this version everyone is on stage – audience, dancers, musicians, right down to the engineer in charge of the motion-sensors and the real-time processing of the dance score, and the video recording team. Everyone is equally exposed, but the space has not become unitary, and here another taboo has been broken : there is no seat from which you can see the entire space, no bird’s eye point of view. The space is fragmented and visibility always partial.

This means that the audience has to opt for focusing on one or other of the two dancers. Each seat is associated with a different performance. And in this respect it is not at all certain that the organ of vision is foremost. True, there is a « journey » for each dancer, but for the most part an inner one, much more a « journey of concentration within the body » than a journey by the body through surrounding space.

We have to learn to read the clues to such a journey if we are to take part in it : to read them in the sequence of the micro-movements, the amplitude of a respiration, the expression on a face, etc. Sitting less than two metres from a dancer, the spectator undergoes an experience that is much more than visual : a synaesthetic experience. All the more so – and this is another major aspect of the work – in that the spectator is plunged and, so to speak, clamped into a musical space. Using ten speakers placed so that the sound waves circulate between them, composer Kasper Toeplitz creates or, more exactly, materialises a space : the one the dancers move in, the one the spectators are held in, etc. More than the actual dimensions, it is the thickness of such spaces that counts, with the choreographer and the composer striving to make it apparent.

The bodies – sometimes light, sometimes heavily anchored to the floor – are either systematically leaning (on sides, edges, extremities) or obliged to assume a strict verticality, and so lead us to see (or feel) a space that is full, enveloping, embracing, a space in which the embraced bodies seem utterly shapable. Our impression is less that of bodies in weightlessness than of bodies trapped in some dense matter, in osmosis with it, maybe like foetuses in their amniotic sacs.

But it should be noted that these sacs are not hermetic : there exist channels of communication between them, among them the sensor-transmitters attached to the dancers’ bodies – to the ankle and knee, at belly and thorax level, on the elbow, on a finger, etc. These enable a dual information flow : one outgoing, in the form of electrical signals that provide information to the « virtual choreographer » – the computer programme that generates the score ; and the other incoming, in the form of choreographic indications that appear at regular intervals on the screens on the floor around the dancers, on which they read their individual scores.

Ultimately the experience is a much richer one than might be expected from a minimalist aesthetic : a new, because explicit, experience of the body, its mobility and its spatial relationship with information.

CHOREOGRAPHY: Myriam Gourfink

MUSIC: Kasper T.Toeplitz

DANCERS: Carole Garriga, Myriam Gourfink /or Cindy Van Acker

VIDEO, SOUND, LIGHTING: Silvère Sayag

MUSIC: Laurent Dailleau, Kasper T. Toeplitzstrong>

PROGRAMMING: Laurent Pottier

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