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I.S.: In 'Under Construction' and 'Live to Tape, a Still Moving Talk Show' you examine the performance from its medium, presentation vs. representation, and the choreographic paradigm shifts from the body to conversation.
J.L.V.: In these two pieces I question my own profession. The entire process of Under Construction and my relocation to Berlin were imbued with the idea of establishing my own company with Clément. I gained confidence that I could survive as an independent artist, I left the domain of state theatres and I returned to my roots – freelance. The fact that I could even start pursuing methods of creative strategies in choreography, relieved of the immense burden of a daily struggle with bureaucracy, meant to me a deeper opening to the medium of contemporary dance.
In 'Under Construction' I recapitulate my artistic past, by discovering influences from the dance field that marked me significantly as a performer and a choreographer. I created a ten minute choreography derived from ten choreographies which made an impression on me. Then I recorded it and I sent it as a DVD to one performer, instructing him/her to learn the choreography on his/her own. We only met later on, directly on stage, in the presence of the audience. That’s when I would see them perform the short choreography for the first time. After the dancer had performed the choreography, we sit down at a table and discuss their process of learning it, without having any information about it.
Eventually I reveal the background of each part of the dance. Then the performer re-performs the choreography, for the second time. This time the performer and the audience experience the same dance in a very different way due to the revealing process that took place during the conversation, which we called a talk show. I navigated this talk by posing questions, so I took on the role of an
interviewer. After many performances, for which each time a new performer was invited, I perfected the performing of myself as a private person. After that challenging experience, I decided to drop acting on stage as a private person, and I turned fully to the building of fictive characters. This is much more fun for me, and it gives me a healthy distance from the medium of dance.
In 'Under Construction', the choreography’s focus is more on the conversation than on movement. As the conversation or the so- called “talk show” moment evolves, Clément is building constructions out of A4 paper in the background and leaves it as a stage set-up.
So here the motive of A4 paper returns, which evokes the idea of the construction of identity, in this case an artistic identity. Every performance is performed by another performer, so it is a one- time experience. We were questioning the differences between performance art and choreography. We reference Francis Alÿs, who stresses that the crucial thing in performance art is that it is a singular experience that can not be repeated. However today performance art is already strongly familiar with re-enactment, which brings the idea of performance art as a one-time experience into question.
Today, documentation plays an extremely important role. It is important to record, edit and promote the work, and documentation itself comes at the end of a real work of art. We took this idea as a guideline for the process of Under Construction. We documented the entire process in various ways and afterwards we set up the documentation material as an exhibition that the audience could visit before the performance. The space was divided into two parts; one was a white box – the exhibition space, and the other a black box – the performance space. The audience thus experienced two different contexts that demanded a shifting of behavioural patterns and a different kind of attention.
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