Sometimes sitting in a theatre watching a performance I say to myself, “What an odd set up this is with people sitting in the dark watching others doing things in the light.” This thought is often followed by a feeling that translates the importance of this rare moment that brings human beings together to form a precious community for our time. I have the impression then of having to relearn being together from this situation that allows for it. But at the same time, the terms seem to insist on the solitude of people caught in the trap of individualism. The dividing lines between the public and the actors, fiction and reality, truths and beliefs, life and death, object and subject, forgetting and remembering seem to want to be repeated and to confirm the divisions. The three pieces of this evening try to displace these lines so that the sense of being stuck gives way to the possibility of moving. For this purpose, in each piece a factor needed for habits to function is removed to produce three situations in which the habitual relationship and exchanges of this gathering (spectators and actors) are no longer self-evident and must therefore be re-negotiated. Each of the pieces hinges on the loss, disappearance, or death of an essential protagonist. The words and actions are motivated by the need to reconstruct with the remaining elements rather than to set out and find or replace what’s missing. The actors and the public are then engaged in mourning and conversations whose transformations try to turn melancholy, loss, or death into driving forces. These movements yield fictions where amnesiacs mix with corpses to produce strange and unsettling situations.

UNTITLED

An evening performance in 3 parts

1st Part: UNTITLED (2005), a lecture: In 2005 an anonymous choreography was presented under the title “Untitled” in five theaters in Europe (Berlin, Paris, Geneva, Montpellier, Lubjana, Valencienne). As an attempt to escape the means of representation that usually help to communicate and promote a work of art to the public, no picture, no text or any information introduced the work before its presentation. The intention of doing so might have been to question what the expectations that a signature, an image, or a text do to the construction of our perception. But in the end it mainly excited the curiosity of the spectators who speculated about who was behind that project rather than what that work does? We could have expected that some persons would have claimed its authorship as it belonged to no one, but nothing like that happened. That work has been described as an attempt to escape identity and representation. It wanted to challenge the imperative of recognition to represent something. With that aim, it was staged in a very dark situation, and the movements were composed to produce zones of indeterminacy between, animate and inanimate, object and subject, the visible and the invisible. That lecture will describe and analyze that choreography and its uncanny characteristics, and we will speculate anew about its potentials, its traps, and necessities.

2nd Part : Untitled Trio

Music: Music for string, percussions and celesta from Béla Bartók – Berlin Symphonique RIAS Orchester directed by Ferenc Fricsay.

3rd Part : Untitled Solo