How to Spell a Piece
The stage is empty, the floors and the walls are white, the lighting is
neutral. Two women, one wearing a red shirt, the other a green one,
walk in from behind and kneel down in the front part of the stage,
leaving some space between them. One goes down on her elbows, the other
one rests her head on the floor, stretches out her arms. From this
position they start moving, repeating a certain routine. The one
dancer’s elbows are lifted from the floor, while the hands remain
there, and with two loud knocks are moved back into the initial
position. Reminiscent of windshield wipers, the other dancer’s
stretched arms start wiping the floor in a steady motion. For a short
period of time the knocks and the wiping are the only sounds heard. The
routine is repeated several times, and then, keeping up the routine,
the dancer in the green shirt starts talking. “I am a woman who follows
a strict routine.” Two loud knocks and the wiping sound. Immediately
movements and words are logically combined, the viewer’s longing for
decoding the movements is satisfied by this one sentence. The story
goes on; from her point of view “the woman” reports things like that
she is rigid yet goes with the flow, likes surfaces, cleans a lot thus
has an aching back, likes to caress, likes to be on top whilst having
sex – which she likes to be soft, not hard, and also that she has a
dog. The story told can be “seen”, or imagined, as mirrored in the
movements of the two dancers. Words such as “surface”, “wipe”, “caress”
correspond to the movements the girl in the green shirt is making;
words such as “rigid”, “on top”, “dog” correspond to the other girl’s
movements.
There’s a short moment of silence. “I am a woman
who follows a strict routine.” The story starts again; this time,
however, bits and pieces of the text are changed up and more details
are brought in, while the routine stays the same. Also the new words
appear to match up to the movements.
When the story yet again
sets in with the now familiar sentence “I am a woman who follows a
routine.”, first, nothing changes in the movements. Only when the next
sentence is spoken, the dancer in the red shirt starts changing up her
movements. From the position with her elbows on the floor she stretches
out and wipes her hands over the floor towards her lower body, a
movement reminiscent of the one that a cat makes when it’s yawning. Her
hands move over her stomach, her chest and upwards, until they’re
stretched. Now she stands up, her arms come together in the shape of a
heart, in a rapid movement they’re torn apart to stretch out again. One
hand tightly closes into a fist and is loosened up when the other arm
moves downwards. More movements follow and at some point she slowly
goes back down on the floor. Still, the story can be seen as connected
with the movements; movements, which, and that has to be said, in no
way specifically or explicitly carry a certain connotation, that being
meaning. When the story is repeated for the fifth time, the dancer who
had been with her head on the floor, wiping her hands left and right,
changes up her routine as well, as the other dancer starts taking over
telling the story. She stands up, bends back, and goes down on her
hands and feet, the back towards the floor. These and a few other
movements that follow will be her repertory for the rest of the
performance.
The correspondence of the words and the movements
becomes a pattern throughout the performance. What is more and more
evident with each repetition is that while the story changes, while
many words are added, only few new movements are introduced. New words
don’t change the movements, but the rhythm of their “production”,
meaning that the rhythm changes in a way that the movements coincide
with the words used. Like the abstract letters of the Latin alphabet,
which is limited to 26 characters, the movements that are used in the
performance, which are countable, “spell” the respective story,
standing in an abstract relation to certain words or groups of
words.
At some point “love” and a “lover” are introduced,
which leads to a performance of a song (Sam Brown – Stop) about the
dancers’ love, “our love”, as they call it. For the choreography, the
whole repertoire of movements they’ve built up during the play is used.
Looking at the movements as part of this pop-song-dance-choreography,
they seem completely devoid of any slightly possible meaning, just
aesthetically pleasing. This becomes especially clear, when the
movement, in which the arms are put together to form a heart and torn
apart, is not used for the phrase “stop breaking my heart”. If the
performance can be divided into parts, this song would mark a break
between the first and the second.
In the next part, the two
dancers continue playing with the viewer’s desire to decode everything
that is seen, however with a different approach: They put together
their movements in one moment, and give these certain moments titles,
creating pictures, by saying “This one could be called… Bambi’s mother
died and the stars were shining”. Immediately references to this title
can be found in the movements the two of them make. But then they use
two different movements from their repertoire and say “This could also
be called… Bambi’s mother died and the stars were shining”. When this
same picture is yet again to be found in the now different movements,
suspicions about one’s own ability of “seeing” or “observing” arise, if
they haven’t before. This game continues for a while, other titles and
other combinations of movements are introduced, eventually the third
part is lead in.
The story now goes away from “the woman’s”
everyday life and depicts a particular (fantastic) incidence: The
discovery of the lover, who was introduced earlier, as turned into a
scary, cruel ghost, and the ensuing fight between the woman, the
lover/ghost – and the dog. When the ghost is introduced, the light
changes in a way that huge shadows are created on the stage’s back
wall. In the style of German expressionist movies of the twenties,
apparent in the dancers’ expressionist facial expressions of terror and
fear and the named shadows, the story evolves to become aggressive and
gruesome in extreme explicitness. The extreme facial expressions and
the quite dreadful story give the movements a very different character:
they are quite scary, even terrifying, now. Although they are the exact
same movements as before, a repetition of the repertoire, in the
surroundings they adopt the relating character. In this third part the
viewer is confronted with yet another approach to the question of “how
to spell a piece”.
What can be said with emphasis is that
they’ve made their point, and that very clearly. However the thought
arises, that they might have made it too clear. They approached their
field of work from different directions, presenting their search, or
actually their findings, their answers, in a very well-made – and
closed structure. The performance can be considered a thoroughly
thought out game with the viewer’s perception. What is promised is
exactly what the viewer gets. The performance is very enjoyable to
watch, however once it is over, no questions are provoked, because
nothing is opened up, there are no gaps that could potentially open a
field for debate. The performance only lasts as long as viewer and
dancers are physically confronted, the creation doesn’t succeed in
transcending the author’s initial idea.
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