What are the consequences of living in a society where the body is gradually losing its position? In a world where technology has slowly manoeuvred man to the point of his own disappearance? At a time when gravity has lost its power and man, by opening up his own mind, rises up and floats around in a virtual world. What would happen if all human activity were to be concentrated into pure energy, if we were to return through evolution to a state of infinitude? Would there then be a point of take-off, a point beyond the crisis, a final attempt at tragedy and humanity?

 

Or is this the moment to get rid of all humanity entirely? Like the Mexican emigrants who wear shoes with a sole like a cow’s hoof to get across the border to the United States. It is significant that in these virtual times animals have greater freedom of movement than people. Is an artist’s only survival strategy in this final phase to actually eradicate his traces? To leave behind what he knows and start anew? To clear the slate of all his aesthetic and political convictions and to begin at the beginning once again? The point to which everything returns: to space, time, energy and a searching body.

 

It is in this space that we find the performance area marked out by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker together with Ann Veronica Janssens and Michel François. In a piece with nine male dancers and one female, a curious triangular relationship unfolds between a female sculptor of light who dwells in the transparent lightness of disappearance, a visual depicter rooted in matter, and a choreographer and her dancers, whose only counterbalance is their bodies and voices. The Song is a laboratory of sound and image, a visual and auditory world where the body in all its concreteness tries to maintain its position in a constantly changing landscape. In this space, that which is on the boundary of our knowledge becomes visible; it concerns the limits of what humans can know and feel. The Song is an exercise in balancing harmony and disruption, and three worlds which at one moment merge seamlessly into one another and the next disturb, provoke and change each other’s minds.

 

In the same way as birds constantly adjust their flight in inimitable patterns, this performance belongs in the transit zone between mathematical precision and human freedom. After the one-to-one collaboration between Anne Teresa and Ann Veronica in Keeping Still and the improvisations for solos, duets and trios in Zeitung, an infinite number of possible combinations opens up in this group piece. How do you create freedom on the basis of an all-directing idea? What is the underlying principle that brings all those birds back into formation, and then effortlessly breaks up this harmony again? How can you fix an idea without preventing it from taking its own course? The Song is a performance that goes beyond its own boundaries. In this joint venture with Michel François and Ann Veronica Janssen, the circle remains open: an idea can at any time be infected by another, or by a different approach or new perspective.

 

In this production the stage space is therefore not a closed container, but an ever-shifting area of possibilities. The stage is stripped down to its bare essentials. The theatre becomes fluid, a box of stage tools, of light and breath, of waves of sound and light that each reveal a new environment. It is a theatre in which the air comes to life, where every sound has its own quality, where no more hierarchical differences are noted. Not between heavy and light, nor between body and mind, nor between the dancer and his surroundings.

 

Like man at the end of time, like man when he has swapped his own footprint for a technological replica, the theatre will be looking for its virtual potential: a space that runs on behind the stage, and starts in the auditorium. A light, virtual place that now consists only of the sparse minimum of what makes theatre: back and front, left and right, horizontal and vertical.

Elke Van Campenhaut
in Journal du Théâtre de la Ville (Paris) n°167 May/June 2009

Translated by Gregory Ball