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Posts from the ‘Yazılar / Texts’ Category

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

Strange but not interesting

Lise Smith

Sixty minutes of the most trite, tedious and downright amateur theatre I have ever endured, Me and My Stranger is a patronising and wholly superficial narration of what it might mean to be “strange”. There’s very nearly an interesting point here about the linguistic parallel between “stranger” meaning “foreigner” and “strange” meaning “unfamiliar”; but Sarah Vanhee is not the woman to make it. Instead, she settles for a series of uncritical summaries of other people’s work, quoting Hannah Arendt and showing lengthy portions of documentary film Vers Nancy, without combining these disparate pieces into any sort of thesis. Read more

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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Oct 27

Professor

 Dean Damjanovski
(* with a little delay)

“Do I see what I hear? Do I hear what I see?” Those are the questions that provoke young and promising French choreographer Maud Le Pladec in her performance “Professor”. In this one-hour work, combining electronic music and sounds, movements, elements of theatre, live music performance and light, she investigates into the relationship between the music and the movement on stage. A large black curtain set parallel to the audience divides the stage in two parts – front and back – creating a situation of anxiety and expectation: what will come out from the other side? Extremely dimmed light brings the mood of “film-noir”. The presence of the three performers who are dressed in (almost) identical costumes, looking like one multiplied person, complete the picture, filling it with suspense and mystery. This visual ambient is dominated by the music structured as a collage of sounds and noises – a composition for electronic ensemble named “Professor Bad Trip” by Fausto Romitelli, which is the original inspiration for this performance. The movements and actions of the performers on stage are in direct relationship to the music. They are the embodiment of what the audience hears. The movements vary from hand gestures, through choreography of the whole body to facial expressions and “narrative” movements. Le Pladec very clearly and categorically announces her intention to “dance the music” from the first solo in the performance and remains consistent until the end. It is a pleasure (for a change) to watch dancers dance to music at least till the end of the third solo. From that moment on the music/movement module just repeats itself with variations. That is the moment when you start to ask youself – what is this performance really about?

Oct 27

“Still standing you” – too much for me

Theresa Steininger

There are things I certainly don´t want to see on stage. Two people beating each other with belts, jumping on each others bodies or pulling each others penises to a very unnatural length are among them. In „Still Standing you“, Pieter Ampe and Guilherme Garrido wanted, according to the program text, to find a new dance idiom which is distinct to everything else going on in contemporary dance – they have suceeded in doing that: I have not seen before many of the moves they have come up with in order to express enmity, friendship, rivalry and love – Ampe walking on the side of Garrido´s feet, the latter pulling one leg in front of the other while lying on the floor, so that the former can step on one after the other. Read more

Oct 27

Urban Fighting – Urban Loving

Iulia Popovici

It’s so entertaining. So unbelievably funny. So physically challenging. So powerful. Even if there isn’t much to think about in this revelation of what the human body can do.

Still Standing You by and with Pieter Ampe and Guilherme Garrido is, in fact, a follow-up – in this piece, the Belgian graduated student of P.A.R.T.S. and the Portuguese performer he met in danceWeb get together in the same formula they did three years ago, with Still Difficult Duet: a one-to-one struggle for power and love in the world of Alpha-males, with no other weapon but their own bodies. With no story and hardly any metaphors.

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