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Flash Preview, 4-26: "Pour ainsi
dire"
Choreographer's Notes
By Maguy Marin
Copyright 2001 Maguy Marin
(Editor's Note: Maguy Marin's "Pour
ainsi dire" receives its U.S. premiere tonight at the New Victory Theater. Following
are Marin's choreographer's notes on the dance, taken from the work's production
notes.)
There is no preliminary projection,
no initial subject.
Process
Just as a sculptor seizes his material
without necessarily having any particular project, one is guided by the material
that presents itself as the initial element of the search for possibilities. It
is when one begins to carve and chisel that one is confronted with different parameters:
the quality of the material (hard, soft...), the need for diverse tools and possible
methods (polish, groove), the efflorescence of hidden elements (knots, cracks,
colors). Little by little, the form acquires meaning, indicating significance.
It is a delicate work of listening, looking and awareness. One must be able to
respond to what the material submits, in order to give it substance. In this case
the performers were the raw material.
Explore still further the "possibilities"
of our search...
The initial idea was to dissociate
the compact group formed by the Company. I wanted to create small clusters in
order to incite the dancers to involve themselves with more urgency, so that the
responsibility of each individual might fully emerge. For within the group, personal
commitment functions more as a relay system. I chose to have the freedom to devote
myself to what the group could project my way.
Singularity calls upon me and interests
me essentially in regard to a community.
An intense fragment of thought.
It relies on the performers' capacity
to bring themselves into play. It also refers to an adverb related to the notion
of time:
"When"
The preparatory technical frame consisted
in vocal and gestural interplays.
As the creation of the piece went
along, a singular state began to arise: An absence of expression, a disarticulate
and decomposed word which cannot convey any tangible meaning, even though it is
coherent; broken items having difficulty to take shape, a divided memory, a disjointed
and fragmentary time.
Through innocuous impressions of
lightness emphasized by luminosity, a flouerie of constant concerns emerges, a
multitude of discontinuous ideas, an overload of expressions; thoughts which countless
fragmentations render unfathomable.
They are people who never cease to
be disconnected, then connected again, and who are unable to communicate because
they cannot bring an idea to its full term, because they stand in a notion of
time discontinuity.
They are individuals, singular responsibilities,
persons who through their histories, their factual encounters and their affects
have the capacity to express themselves at the "indefinite" article -- as defined
by Gilles Deleuze.
Set phrase implying that : "One isn't
quite able to say... "
This is an inquiry into the subjective
perceptions of time; in other words, it is an attempt at finding multiple responses
to the notion of time that one has or might have.
A play on voices, languages and movements,
it conveys a closed universe of disarticulated time in which three people continuously
assert their identities in order to exist.
At the core of this fragmented time,
fears, evoked by discontinued time, become apparent, where all thought is voiced
by snatches of conversation, where ideas are incessantly disconnected, then reconnected,
and where the memory has become disjointed.
In this display of a mechanism of
fragmentary thought, these three individuals flit from one subject to the other
with an utterly instinctive logic, but being undeniably unable to communicate.
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