MEDIATHEK

Nottthing Is Importanttt is a cinema performance. A suite of three conditions – nine bodies, a movie, and a darkness and sound installation – the work plays with questions about the visible, the visual, and the construction of the imaginary. On a shallow stage in an intimate cinema-like space, a group of nine dancers perform a stream of simple actions reproducing the shapes of objects with their bodies at a slow pace. Immediately following the dancers' exit, a non-narrative movie featuring two familiar but unrelated icons of American folklore is projected on the wall. The movie's soundscore intensifies a rupture between looking and listening.When the movie is over, the audience is brought into a new environment, where the performers continue their tasks in darkness, and the sound shifts from being the element in between, to being space itself, and the architecture and everything it contains.The three parts of the work are related conceptually but not contingent upon one another thematically. Nottthing Is Importanttt plays with the distinctions and similarities between what can be seen, what can be felt, what is known, what is invisible, and what is imagined.

"When we first performed this piece at The Kitchen, in February 2007 it involved a non-narrative movie featuring two familiar but unrelated icons of American folklore, portrayed by John Jernquist and myself. During the movie, an additional stream of live actions was performed by a group of intensely focused individuals including Elizabeth Ward, Otto Ramstad, Alejandra Martorell, Danielle Goldman, Pedro Jimenez, Andrea Maurer and others. The movie's soundscore by Senna Parkins, fractured and connected the space between looking and listening. When the movie was over, we brought  the audience into a new environment, where the performers continued their tasks in darkness, and Zeena's sounds shifted from being the element in between, to being the space itself, the architecture, and everything it contained"

DD Dorvillier, Oaxaca, Mexico, October 4, 2008

// Credits //

Concept and choreography: DD Dorvillier
Music: Zeena Parkins
Movie Editor: by Ryutaro Ishikane
Video game sequence: Victor Morales
Lighting Designer: Thomas Dunn
Movie actors: DD Dorvillier, John Jernquist
Performers: Danielle Goldman, Martin Lanz Landazuri, Alejandra Martorell, Andrea Maurer, Paul Neuninger, Mina Nishimura, Peter Sciscioli, Otto Ramstad, Elizabeth Ward

Made possible with generous support from Altria Group, Inc., the Harkness Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, the James E. Robison Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Austrian Cultural Forum, the Mertz Gilmore Foundation, the Multi-Arts Production Fund, a program of Creative Capital supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Movement Research Artist Residency Project, funded, in part by the Leonard and Sophie Davis Fund, with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency, and from Materials for the Arts. Parts of this work were developed during residencies at La Caldera in Barcelona, Spain; and at Performing Arts Forum (PAF) in St. Erme, France.

[efr] https://www.humanfuturedancecorps.org/ https://thekitchen.org/