"During Beginning Ending" - the title of a piece conceptualized and performed by the Chilean dancer Varinia Canto Vila, suggests a paradoxical time-space frame of a disrupted by constant startings and endings continuum, of an ungraspable, undermined notion of an in-between. She initiates it by neutrally standing in front of the audience in a training outfit thus producing a perception of her as bodily presence, as a material, provoking anticipations of what could be done with it. The dancer establishes an eye-to-eye contact with the spectators, thus affirming the code of the mutual situation as the one of observation. Then, she goes to the bottom of the stage and in a moment she raises her hands and lets them into a strangely disintegrated continuum of movements. Gradually the face, the torsos and then the whole body are being involved into it. While one movement starts, it ends almost simultaneously, flowing into another; it ends during its beginning, leading to a beginning of another one. The chain of beginnings and endings unfolds arbitrary and randomly, by an ungraspable logic of occasionally directed kinetic impulses thus conveying a sense of soft fluidity of the performer’s body, to use the casual metaphor - of a marionette or a mechanic puppet with strings cut. In the system of their perception and observation the performer is an equal participant who is distant to the process that her mechanic engine schizophrenically is put into, as if out of possession. At a certain moment the kinetic logic of the motion leads to a stop, to a moment of no continuation. The performer begins to deconstruct the previous sequences in a particularized chaotic order which brings her to falling. The rising up proceeds in attempts that exhaust all the possibilities and energy of its doing. Then another element is being brought into the game – a kind of snoring like of not known origin which underlines the surrealistic disintegration of the whole – body, movement, sound that comes out of it. At the end, the situation of observation is closed again by eye-to-eye contact with the audience. End of the mutual contract and the single settled convention.

 "During Beginning Ending" is a piece that can be called "spectral dance", study "of the performing of perfomativity in general" (Rudi Laermans). It puts on display the movements as a spectacle of themselves in their particular process of transformation. If the classical  choreography is defined as a coded sequence of movements and confides to the dancer the ability to discipline and produce it as an integrated and signified whole, “During Beginning Ending” subverts this notion by showing movements emptied out of "self-consciousness". They are happening and going on as if not because of the will of the performer, but beyond it and they find nowhere a point of definition. Varinia Canto Vila’s piece experiences the performer as a liminal subjectivity that is only able to observe its performativity in a constant process of resistance and unsettled becoming, thus questioning the ability of possessing of the own corporeal material.    

Angelina Georgieva