Plesna scena.hr

Instability of the Visible

Paces, concept and choreography: Petra Zanki & Britta Wirthmüller

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  The dance solo called Paces is part of the Antibodies Cycles, in which Petra Zanki and Britta Wirthmüller deal with the bodies that “fall through the matrix of what is normally accepted or valued as possible”. The project thus focuses on those marginal bodies that are, like some sort of a Minotaur, pushed far away from the view of others and into the labyrinths of the society, in order not to disturb the existing social/market/political systems. Thus, the Antibodies Cycle explores bodies without a defined sex, abandoned bodies, or bodies that suffer violence, by seeking to understand their mode of existence through changes in their own principles of movements and bodily concepts.
  
  Paces are taking place in the achromatic space of a white studio, with a dancer dressed in grey. A few plumes of smoke are sufficient to question the visibility of things, to shift space and dissolve the body. Semitransparent projection of a landscape shot through the leaves of grass quivers lightly on the wall and in its own reflection in the mirror, while in the second part of the performance it is the minimalist music by Phill Niblock that repeatedly fills the space.
  
  Choreography takes the form of sequences and slight variations of the simplest possible movement – the sway. At first, it is a slight transfer of weight in which arms are introduced gradually, followed by the element of circling around one’s own bodily axis. Upon exhausting its momentum, the sway moves on to another part of the body, to the arms, the hips, or the head; at certain moments, it experiences gradation as it draws in the torso and the back.
  
  The sway and its variations are performed mechanically, in an abstract manner – analytically, with a visibly deep and almost mystical concentration, yet without abandoning oneself to the movement, or allowing the movement to take one further into space or into emotion. Thus, the pure and precise structure of the choreography remains perfectly minimalistic, even poetical in all its purity and the discreet presence of the dancer.
  
  What is initially experienced as mechanical movement is transformed through duration and the architecture of sway into the permanent instability of the visible. In a paradoxical manner typical of minimalism, the alternation of variations and repetitions brings to the surface, through the ethereal layers of varied movement, the essential quality of humanity that lies behind the performance.
  
  Paces can be viewed as a work of pure choreographic formalism, as audio-visual installation, but also as a performance on the politically engaged subject of body vs. antibodies. But whatever starting point we may take, Paces always returns to its source, which speaks of its maturity, perfection and complexity.
  
  © Iva Nerina Sibila, PLESNA SCENA.hr, 30 November 2011
  translation: Marina Miladinov

Piše:

Iva Nerina
Sibila