Preliminary concepts
“The here and now is a prison house. We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalizing rendering of reality, to feel a then and there. … Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or a concrete possibility for another world.”
– Cruising Utopia by Jose Esteban Munoz
In “The City”, two performers are engaging in the action of constant skipping (as in skipping down the street). They create pathways, outlining geometries, while repositioning themselves in space through continuous movement. Their road-trip choreography consists of repetition and variation and is induced with turns, spins and aerodynamic arm gestures that intensify the position of their bodies in the imaginary grid of a city.
Skipping is a historical motion for the human body and it relates to a bodily experience that everyone knows. In this constructed environment of uninterrupted use, skipping offers the possibility for creating abstract narratives as well as stimulates the imagination in regards to the background, meaning and objectives of this happening. The audience is a witness of the struggle of working against gravity and is invited to come in discourse and negotiation with their own inventiveness and perception of the weaving paths and persistent
travelling of space and bodies.
“The City” as a project is my attempt to create a systemic universe that blinks in existence. In this city, I search for groping the architectural design, the matter of consistence as well as the encounter with the imagery implanted, found or projected on it. The pathways that I’m busy creating could lead to (un)historical monuments, encounters for astonished contemplation or just
the experience of a ride.
The skippers are the ones to make the city visible, weaving the pathways and crossings, the dead-ends and turns, revealing and reconstructing at the same time. The materials used for composition are the different variations of skipping along with additions of turns,
pirouettes, arm extensions, single jumps and walking, all of which unravel in all directions possible and in different relations to the axis of
the body.
The motion of skipping is important to be kept constantly alive, since it is the one to put the bodies in their most vulnerable state and
therefore we can question their substance, position and distance. Poetically, I wonder how we become stardust; how our bodies become a dance that is everlastingly becoming. Through skipping, I intend to focus on not just the transport but also the dispersion of the body
and the traversing of space, something that I have been partly busy before in my choreographic decisions and now would like to
investigate further.
The bodies of the performers are entering a continuous motion that brings them inevitably in a precarious state of managing their comprehension of space and body-navigation. The audience on the other hand is invited to follow this constant motion from their own position and understanding, as well as tap into the possibilities of interpreting with their imagination the happenings on stage, therefore expanding and re-identifying the currents of becoming and the possible collective achievements. If it is that we disrupt our stories and histories, then what is then the space we are in and moving forwards to? If our history cannot be broken, if we cannot live outside of it, then how do we live within it? And then again, what love, togetherness, hope and future have to do with this exact time we are living in?
The premiere of THE CITY will happen 22nd - 24th of March 2018 in Veem House for Performance, Amsterdam.
Take a look at some of the research presentations on the Skipping practice, at the Sketches page.