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Five choreographers, from Italy, France, Croatia and two from Canada, were invited to respond to this situation and this generated five solo pieces. I was thinking about how to approach such a challenging and significant subject, and since I was focusing on developing a character, like in the previous solos, I decided to create a role of someone hailing from the legal system, a lawyer, an attorney or even a diplomat, someone representing migration laws, and enter the dance context from that point of view.
I applied choreography as a tool that constrains, encloses, determines and controls the movement trajectories just like the migration laws are controlling the paths of migrants. That is why, throughout performance, I carry an electronic tablet on top of my head and therefore I cannot move so much. Also the choreography I created is a line dance, which is very limited in movement and in space. At the end of the piece the culmination of the constraints reach their peak when I stand on the pile of books and while keeping my balance, shaking and trembling, I try to read the text in four different languages. Working with constraints is something that Clément uses often in his works, and I discovered its power and creative force for the first time in 'Staying Alive'.
I.S.: After these two dance works, you make a comeback in a representational framework, performing a role, i.e. a character, in particular in Staying Alive and Lady Justice. In these works you seem to be pushing the exploration of the very field of choreography and performing strategies to the background.
J.L.V.: Well, the exploration of performing strategies brought me back to the question of representation. From this moment on I consciously decided to work with representational modes in my work, through constructing roles and characters. In Under Construction, where I had to perform myself multiple times, I started to question the idea of the authentic body on stage, that doesn’t play but “act”, and I came to the conclusion that there is no such thing.
"Die Tradition der Unterdrückten lehrt uns, dass der "Ausnahmezustand", in der wir leben, ist nicht die Ausnahme, sondern die Regel. Wir müssen Zu Eminem Begriff Der Geschite kommen, Der dem
entspricht."
"The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not exception but the rule. We must attain a conception of history that is in
keeping with this insight. "
Walter Benjamin
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