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Posts from the ‘Inceleme / Review’ Category

Oct 30

Looking for the stranger

Martina Rösler

In Me and My Stranger the belgium performer and theatre-maker Sarah Vanhee is exploring the notion of the stranger. Her lecture performance is strongly related to the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy and his novel L’intrus. In one hour Vanhee presents a collage of film excerpts, street interviews and recitations of different texts that are somehow connected with the phenomenon. She for instance refers to the German political theorist Hannah Arendt, shows parts of Pasolini’s film Teorema and parts of Claire Denis’ documentary about Jean-Luc Nancy called Vers Nancy. Vanhee also traces an ark to the current political situation in Belgium and appeals to the highly problematic issue of immigration. Moreover she includes scientific, microbiological descriptions in her lecture by talking about the human immune system being assaulted by something strange.
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Oct 30

Body Architecture

Martina Rösler

How do we position our own body to the constructed architecture that surrounds us? Why do we consider some structures, objects, environments as hospitable and others as inhospitable?
The Turkish dancer and choreographer Filiz Sızanlı invites the audience in her new solo Site to a white cube, where she examines the relationship between architecture and power. Surrounded by thin white fabric walls that are open to the audience her body is already part of the stage design. The first movement sequence follows the principle of constantly looking up to the ceiling. Her head disappears, we just see her throat and chin, her body looks distorted. Starting with small finger and arm movement she slowly gets up from a sitting position and starts to move through space. Something weird is going on in her body, as if she was unable to walk “normally”. Suddenly also sounds are coming out of her. She repeats the vocal ”A” and sends it up like air bubbles. The vocal utterances slowly transform to words. Sızanlı is talking very quietly, sometimes just moving her lips, we can just pick up some fragments of Turkish language. She is now lying on the side of her body with bend legs, facing the audience, pretending that she is sitting on a chair. The dimensions of space start to drift apart, an imaginary space opens up denying reality. Read more

Oct 28

Friendship sometimes hurts

Martina Rösler

A dialog between two friends turns out to be an intimate, mischievous, brutal and barbaric meeting of two male bodies. They hit each other hard (while murmuring Mozart’s “Kleine Nachtmusik”) and at the same time one of them tenderly draws a heart with sweating fingers on the others skin, while embracing deeply.

The two young artists Pieter Ampe from Belgium and Guilherme Garrido from Portugal carry on their collaboration they started 2009 with the successful performance Still Difficult Duet. In Still Standing You they propose a rich spectrum of aspects that are implicated in masculine friendship and human relationship in general. They invite us to their playground – a place of violence and fragility where they “communicate” in a particular, unique way.

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Oct 28

A strange performance

Maxime Fleuriot

Me and my stranger belongs to that particular kind of performances that is called « lecture performances». During one hour, Sarah Vanhee is bringing to the stage her various thoughts on the very topic of strangerness which she refers as something that fascinates her. The whole lecture tries to link the very political understanding of what is usually refered to when talking about a stranger (politically speaking) and the very presence of strangerness in a biological, organic perspective. In that perspective, Sarah Vanhee uses various materials : she shows extracts of films dealing with the issue (Vers Nancy by Claire Denis, Theoreme by Pasolini), refers to vegetal developments (the mutual interdepedency of the orchaida and its lungus), reads scientific contributions about the immune system or shows the results of a street random video inquiry with people being asked two questions : what is a stranger?

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Oct 28

Everybody is a stranger

Theresa Steininger

„Everybody is a stranger, almost everywhere“. Based on this fact, Sarah Vanhee has put together a lecture-performance „Me and my stranger“, shown in the garajistanbul in the idans-Festival. The Belgian theatre-maker and performer has had good ideas of how to treat the topic in many different ways: She does not only show street-interviews with both people from Ghent, some from there originally, some from another country, and treats the political part of the question, but also brings the topic to a scientific level when talking about a strange organ or the virus being a stranger in our body. She uses documentary with Jean-Luc Nancy talking about foreigners as well as Pasolini´s film „Teorema“, exempliying the attraction of a stranger. She uses a letter by a soldier, writings by philosopher Hanna Arendt, photos of horrifying frontier-fences. And she makes us identify with her when talking about feeling like a stanger in a group of people you have the impression you don´t belong to. Nevertheless, the performance remains too well-educatedly done, Vanhee seems not very secure and arranging many parts without connecting them, not presenting feelings to experience and share, on the whole a mostly boring lecture giving you the impression that you have seen it all before.

Oct 28

Me, Myself and I

Nóra Bükki Gálla

How far can you stretch your boundaries is the question Flemish performer Sarah Vanhee presents to us in her lecture about strangeness. We like to see it as a sociology or political issue but if we dig deeper, we find other aspects to complement the picture. Fragmented as it is, it still adds up to a kind of Dorian Gray portrait – you end up looking at yourself in the mirror with all your past mistakes and possible futures written on your face, block capitals.

Depending on our ethical taste and sensitivity for social nuances we can still live with this image; the bold ones can even try to justify our inability to deal with pressing issues of immigration, frustration based nationalism and a complete and total unwillingness to communicate with the Other. (Oh sure; if we did communicate, we could end up coming to an understanding, Heaven forbid a consensus. But let’s not get lost in the labyrinth of idiotic idealism.) Read more

Oct 28

All or Nothing

Nóra Bükki Gálla

Is there music in the silence between two notes? Can emptiness have a rhythm, a direction, a meaning? John Cage is exploring just that gray area of voices and images blinking out of existence in his piece Lecture on Nothing – a verbal narrative by a single voice, drifting with the flow of free association. Dancer and choreographer Eszter Salamon recreates the same void by using a non-expressive movement material and welding it all in a never ending cycle of repetition.

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