Day 11: Brice Leroux / Romeo Castellucci
Booked a ticket for Brice Leroux? I sure hope you’re not afraid of the dark, then. Booked a ticket for Castellucci’s 13 minute performance Storia dell’Africa? Please do not forget to tell me what thát is all about.
It’s difficult to talk about Solo#2 – Fréquences, the new performance of French choreographer Brice Leroux, without giving it all away. Let’s just say that you’ll be guided into the complete darkness, and will be asked to follow a white, glowing line on the floor. The rest of Solo#2 involves a cage, lots of glow-in-the-dark tubes, horizontal and vertical lines, one hundred ticking metronomes (needed for György Ligeti’s Poème symphonique pour 100 métronomes), and one dancer.
All possible movements of a torso. That’s what Leroux has been working on for this performance, which premièred during the KunstenFestivalDesArts. But don’t expect an abundance of movements. Leroux is concentrating on minimalism. ‘I am looking for the essential foundations of composition’, he explains in an interview. ‘The more one reduces the range of movements, the more their arrangement becomes important as a source of richness.’ By doing all this, he tries to reveal the physical forces involved in human movement, the relations between space and rhythm.
But why then, is the inevitable question, does it have to be thát dark, inside? ‘If you repress a certain perception, you will stimulate another’, is Leroux’s answer to that. He hopes the dimmed light will trigger a concentration that focuses on the movement’s intrinsic geometry.
And that’s where Solo#2 – Fréquences misses its point, in my opinion. It certainly works as some sort of ‘art installation’. You sit there, looking at an intriguing piece of work (a revolving cage, that dancer, the lights), listening to the ticking metronomes. And time goes by. But when it comes to it’s choreographic intentions, Solo#2 fails. You try to focus on the movements of that body, but in the end, you give up. Because no matter how hard you try, it looks as though there’s nothing to be seen. And certainly not ‘an exhaustive analysis of all possible movements of a torso’.
Then on to Romeo Castellucci’s Storia dell’Africa contemporanea Vol. III. The first of three performances to be shown at the KunstenFestivalDesArts. While I was sitting outside, waiting, I was intrigued by the audience leaving Storia dell’Africa. They all looked stupefied. Surely something really special was going on, in that Brigittines Chapel.
Now I know that they were not shocked or deeply impressed at all. They were just wondering: what the hell was this all about? It goes without saying that Romeo Castellucci is an important director. But Storia dell’Africa is too cryptic an affair. I didn’t get it. And most of the people around me didn’t get it either. Someone?
(photo credit: Paolo Rapalino)
May 19, 2009 at 03:41
I’m with you entirely on the Brice Leroux piece. I didn’t read the blurb before I went in so I just assumed he was trying to fill time until the metronomes stopped. It certainly was stunning until the possibilities of the revolving cage had been exhausted. But if the purpose of the piece was to explore every possible movement of the torso, why the cage, why the darkness, why the spiralling way in? The original minimalists would have just presented it unadorned if it was a statement of a fundamental.
You’ve jumped to conclusions though about the Storia dell’Africa audiences. I really did see something special. The man-buttress that produces foam from its mouth is a desiring machine. Castellucci returns to Deleuze and Guattari, who were such important influences on work such as Amleto, but this time he brings a melancholy, a history to it. The one thing Anti-Oedipus failed to address sufficiently was mortality. Here Castellucci has done it.
March 27, 2010 at 20:50
[...] Romeo Castellucci [...]