Dear prospective participants,
Below is part of a project description. I have decided to do this project as often as I can in the next year. At ImPulsTanz we will work on this together. I am not certain of the details but I am fairly certain that we will be giving small performances of some nature on a semi regular basis and then moving on to making new ones. This Pro Series Project's goal is to not generate a Really Big Show. Really I just want to DO it, not MAKE it. I think eventually it will be an exhibition. So the invitation to you is to practice this project with me, for me or parallel to me. The lovely Valentina Desideri will be joining us in the second week.
Dario Argento, Rebecca Horn and Dan Flavin walk into a bar…
The content of this project is generated by a fictive alliance between works that are not my own: Susperia (film by Dario Argento), der Eintänzer (film by Rebecca Horn) and the catalogue of Dan Flavin between 1976-77 (the time span of the productions of the two films).
The films, one colour saturated, gory and baroque, the other, white and creamily bourgeois, both base themselves in hermetic worlds of DANCE as imagined by non dancers. Dance is not the subject; it is a behaviour that furnishes a mood. Both are all deeply weird. The pauses between stylised dialogue and insistent image propose an irresistible choreographic space.
These films are both full and empty; they have obsessively detailed visuals. Their narratives are both perfunctory and experimental. I sense that they have strange areas of confluence that generate more than simple comparison. This project proposes to "practise" these areas until they begin to generate a third exterior space. The work of Dan Flavin with its silent insistence on festive formalism and its sentimental titles (always for a person in particular) is invited as the unknown guest that will make a conversation possible. He is an intuition. These works are not references, they will be my colleagues; they are a territory.
The practising of these works will be based in a translation into practice of various fascinating elements; purposeful, obtuse activity at the corners of the frame, louche re-workings of twenties and thirties glamour body language through the style of seventies, the performance of costume and prosthesis, an aura of rigorous torpor, inadequate overdubbing that brings the face into abstract movement, the touching, absurd choreography of heterogeneously approximated classical dance, the continued re-appearance of body figures that are meant to be "expressive" but only do so through a mistake of style, the languid and false movements of actors performing being dancers at rest, a blaze of oscillating colour providing the Ausdrucktanz solo, the luxury of an empty space meant for dancing but holding only static, the singular notes of creepy melodies, the humming harmonics of a saturated hue, performative concentration filmed as a still life, and so on. Implied somewhere in all these works is a shadow of mid-century, western, counter-culture mysticism passed through various art sieves: experimental concept, Technicolor gore, late high-art canon. I am guessing this project will bring us directly in contact with this shadow.
This work will be modular in nature, only one or two fascinations at a time, elongating their effect in the body and in time. With each module I want to reduce the field of investigation as much as possible, one idea to one show. The length of each show will vary in the extreme - 10 minutes to all day.
The modules will be dispersed throughout different institutions and performance venues. Each module will be produced with the means offered by each: place, space, money, time.
This is the first time for me in a great, long while that fascination with the visual, in fact, fascination itself, is the primary motor for the creation of a physical state. It feels like an indulgence. It feels like a mystery. I am not even sure I am supposed to be doing this project at this point, and this makes me very curious about it.
