DD DORVILLIER
human future dance corps

Dance is the archeologist of dance, digging into dance, by dancing to the bone.

 

To create a dance situated in the here and now, the dancer digs back and forth in the sediments of memory and its landslides: from place to place, she moves the memory of gestures, people and stones. She dances the earth to the bone, until perhaps she finds a piece of carved wood, a primitive idol, a small piece of presence...

 

This year a series of dances scores arose from a dream while working on Landscape stories. After naming and describing the dances from the inside, and writing them, I understood that they were familiar to me, but also different, and would not have emerged but for the site visits, interviews, and group practices that took place prior to this dreaming. These dance scores are practices that can be used as research tools, and they are choreographic. This material is a springboard for Dance is the archeologist, or an idol in the bone.

​

If dance has persistent disappearance as a basic condition of its existence, then it implies the appearance of things too. As in archeology, we suspect something there, we go digging to reveal it. A dance buried in a dream, appears only after dancing it again. It appears, we write it, send it back through the dreaming of the beholder, time bends.

 

Sedimentation and digging, poetry, landscape. The synergies of stone, language, and movement are at work, carrying in the body, fragments of Untitled landscapes.

​

As I observe the dancer in Simone Forti's Logomotion she is not silent, she has a voice, she speaks about the world, and her moving speaks about the world. In my current process I'm observing how a quasi-antagonistic dynamic between speaking and dancing. From this friction emerges a third “thing”, perceived from the outside, something I cannot control.

For the audience and the dancer too, dancing and speaking, and the body in a space, inevitably produce images, or third “things”. Sometimes the experience and what is understood of it, seem to be at odds. I see this as an opportunity, a pleasurable and resonant emptiness full of potential.

 

Language and orality haunt my current dancing. There's a need to use the body in an immediate way, and to move and sense the lightness of the mutual gaze of audience and performer, in this case me. There's a need to use the voice, relying on a playful complicity between dancing and words. And there's a need to situate dancing and to contend with its delicate capacity to create space for listening and observing differently.

 

Some previous works that attempt to reconcile understanding and experience in different ways:

 

An assisted solo with Elizabeth Ward (begin at 04:30) in 2005 grapples with sound and my own body as objects, as I interact and negotiate actual objects. Multiple and often simultaneous images, charged spaces, and emptinesses emerge out of this instant relational composition. I aim to make it possible for the viewer to be in their own process of observation and understanding through stillnesses, graphic connections with mundane objects, or impulsive actions in the space and with the architecture.

 

In 2009, a duo with the poet-performer Quim Pujol (begin at 14:05) brings forth a passage to the spoken word, as a problem and a reason to rejoice. Words situate, replace, derail, re-present, re-new, play with, movement, dancing, and performing – and with the problem of theatrical of representation. With humor, words gradually dismantle a certain understanding of things. They establish slippery images that in turn become motors of the dance, which in turn flips the sense of the words.