Videodrome
The duet captured in camera 1: touch touch, the touch of grooming the body, women in the dialogue of comforting each other, defining self and other, measuring lengths, grooming, criticize, size up, dress dress, measure other/measure self, compare, bouncing in and out of focus
6.
Art is not an argument, rather, an experience.
The choreographer sets up a series of rules. The artist sets up a situation. Events happen, things play out. The notion of success and failure is discarded. there is only the experience, the expression, transmitted to the audience.
Can the audience trust itself enough to know?
Running together, one leads, then the other. Pigtails stream. Curls. Sharp flat faces, like dolls, slightly kabuki makeup. Descending, descending, the lighting drifts them into silhouettes.
7.
The duet that uses verbal language (i'm lost, OK, stop) echoed by the other dancer - sometimes Gwen, sometimes Jenn, says it first. The other echoes. This gesture contains the entirety of the piece: all the duets have gestures passed from one dancer to the other, echoed, returned, like throwing a ball back and forth. Lighting silhouettes them as they move through the still active camera. The camera bouncing in and out of focus, the automatic perceptions and memories of the self? Beautiful, the fog of it.
Struggling, the launch moves up again, the static and pop grows. The dancing becomes more of a struggle. Do their bodies argue with some Jell-o? The gestures that were clear earlier in the piece have accumulated, accellerated, the dancers become windup dolls moving too fast, too jerkily -- building, slow build (new language) "missing" (new language) "nothing" -- the repetition of language passed back and forth, the sudden movements repeated -- memory has accumulated, become corrupted in the flow of dialogue, the faults in the dancer's perceptions.
8.
Words from the program about RE: Memory (2) :
Notes about the piece and process: The choreographer asked the dancers to work with memory, repetition and duplication as templates to create a constructed movement history within real time performance. Exemplifying her interest in choreography as a form of documentary, Durning gave the dancers the task of constructing the piece while they perform it. Inevitably, the dancers mutate and distort events as they try to remember and reproduce them. Their perception of "what happened" alters the piece every time it is performed, ultimately revealing Durning's exploration of dance as part documentary, part fiction, and part abstraction.
9.
sit down hard into chairs downstage. audio/video out. facing each other across. breathe breathe. and - to black.
RE: Memory (2) was world-premiered in Pittsburgh at the New Hazlett Theater as part of the LABCO Dance Company's Holding Passage, Jan 24-26, 2009.
Multimedia artist, videographer, and writer Jessica M. Fenlon grew up loving fairy tales. Now she explores story and our need for it to distance ourselves from the more incomprehensible aspects of life. Her first book of poetry, Spiritual Side Effects, will be published in 2009. You can find out more about Jessica, and see her work, by visiting her website, www.drawclose.com