To strangle time by Gilles Amalvi
“Slowed down, one feels the pulse of things”, Henri Michaux, La ralentie.

Starting from where ?

Suppose a project of a choreographic centre of a new kind: the Dancing Museum. Suppose a new place to house it, Le Garage. And suppose the event, the “happening”, weaving together place and project, audience, choreographers and dancers — amateurs, professionals, teachers or performers. This was Saturday April 27th, 2009, from 7:00 PM to 7:00 AM. Étrangler le temps : a night full of works in slow motion, suspended movements spreading though the Garage space. A night leafed through, where were superposed the propositions, temporalities, memories and gestures. A sum of moments from which a continuum emerged, a current connecting in a subterranean way a concert, a butoh performance, a jazz lesson, a folkloric dance from Britanny…

If this slowed down night created an unusual experiment — exceding the sum of its moments — it is probably because it offered the possibility of re-thinking our relation to the living performing arts, to the way they can be understood and perceived. And that could be read in this préfiguration the metaphor of the relation to intuition, to the audience and to the creation which the Dancing Museum is trying to inaugurate. If the metaphor is a transport (as Claude Simon reminds us, Metaphoron is the inscription one can read on the Greek buses), maybe the purpose of a “Dancing Museum” would be to displace our way of perceiving this phenomenon called dance — to leave us time to see, to understand, and to grasp the point one is watching from. Displace, in order to make visible the circuits, the confused areas, the porosity to places, to times, to words, to artistic forms; in order to try and joint the living and the reflexive — art and archive, creation and transmission.

The transport which took place that evening had something of a general slowing down of functions. A sliding of their established borders: displacement of the function cultural place, of the function spectator, of the function gaze, of the functions choreographic “genre” or “family”.

If the contradictory terms museum and dance refer to the matter of production and conservation, one can wonder how to hark back to this event, several months after it took place. What trace should one lay down, that could remain a trace for others — those who saw it, those who didn’t see it, who attended or who never even heard about it? And how to let these slidings (of time as well as of land) emerge, which one can catch only at the crossing — of spaces, shows, rumours, experiments? Must one take possession of a memory? Of a moment, of a show in particular ? Of an atmosphere? Of a concept? Of the words that designate it, of the bodies that occupied it, of the photos or films documenting it?

Each chosen point of view will reflect others, each thread pulled can unroll several reels. Numberless knots: the idea of a “Dancing Museum” already holds many of them. Here are a few entries and exits, there and back, to let the reels unroll.

Re-entries
When entering the Garage, at 7 :00 PM, carrying a map showing the localization of the various events, one is first disoriented — spatially as well as subjectively. No centre, no direction of the circulation. No directions for use. Does one visit it (like a museum), does one stride over it (like a space), does one watch it (like in a theatre), does one experiment it (like a workshop), does one get lost in it (like in a maze), does one consume it (like in the supermarket)?

In the manner of the “architectural stroll” praised by Le Corbusier (a place exists only when it’s strode over), the organization of the Garage offers the possibility of inventing one’s own course, speed, and way of approaching the works. This necessity of finding one’s own compass will generate in space — in parallel to the dances being performed there — a large variety of attitudes and states. Some spectators move around quickly, going from one room to another. Others on the contrary stop, become absorbed in the contemplation of a gesture. Confronted to this unusual decrescendo, the bodies either liven up or freeze, or press themselves, or loiter. One must find a way of adjusting.

The relation to this desoriented mass, released into a space with no established borders must have been quite violent for the dancers, changed into settings, objects, dummies: scrutinized, jostled, disturbed (or ignored), they too are deprived of their landmarks. A glimpse : two young girls photograph each other with their mobile phones, next to a dancer almost motionless, as though he was a supermarket Santa Claus. A bit like those English guards who are not allowed to move or to react, the dancers continue, imperturbable. Time is on their side. The slow motion insists. Once the frenetic moment of the spectator’s entrance has passed, one notices that something of the slowness begins to pass inside the bodies. Surrounded by those seemingly weightless figures, the impression of being too quick, brittle, clumsy, forces one to slow down too. An effect of contamination begins to spread, an imperceptible change of state.

It quickly appears that the happening includes as many participants as there are people present. The object of the gaze is not any more only what dances, but everything that moves: the whole of the reactions and relations becomes an active part of the event.

Places
The show Crash dance — which could be discovered at the beginning of the evening — takes place in a rather narrow space. When entering the room, one discovers some bodies standing, others leaning, sitting, or lying down. Some look, some are looked at — but without it being possible to ascertain in what direction the circulation is made, who is the actor of a gesture, and who is a motionless spectator. An interference area comes into view, a particularly perceptible jumble of positions : the instability of places.

In a way, nobody is at his right place, each one has to invent it. Physical place (benches, cushions, seats) and subjective place (how to be a spectator, a dancer), usually prepared, find themselves indicated and put into mirror: place is constantly missing, or available — no position of equilibrium. In a room with no sitting places, one huddles together as one can. In another one, wider and filled with cushions, a few spectators only: some are looking, some are resting or writing. In a disposition where the shows are not necessarily labeled (one can watch, for a long time, a play without knowing what it’s about, and by whom), place is left for idleness. A proposition, La fonte de l’individu, is a perfect example of the setting up of such questions: in a corridor, (and, a bit later on, overflowing as far as the hall), anybody can let himself melt “from the vertical position to the heaviest spreading out”. All it takes is to choose a place, and undo it.

For who discovers the spectacle of the bodies — at different stages of the thaw —, it can look as well like a performance in progress as like an invitation to do the same, like a dancer as like a spectator. Moment of relaxing, of holiday, to be read like a funny or gloomy image. The image of an ending, or of the most perfect idleness.

Undance
Belgian artist Eric Duyckaerts has invented a game “that consists in starting from the prefix ”dé” (un-) in the system of French verbs. To take away the ”dé” (dédéser), to add the “dé” (déser), then see how it works, invent meanings and words” (Jacques Dubois). For example, the verb “délirer” allows to invent the verb “lirer”, déchirer, “chirer” (one can try to give them a meaning afterwards). This method could be compared — introducing some game and therefore new ways of using the language — with the effects produced on dance by slow motion. Some rules fall, new uses are revealed.

For this first contact with the public, a space allows to experiment the slow motion oneself, in an unexpected way: a jazz lesson proposed by Wayne Barbaste, in which everyone can take part. Neutralizing the virtuosity (often linked to the speed of perormance) and the know-how, slow motion makes it possible to enter in the dance, without feeling oneself scrutinized, or judged, without having to know how to dance, or to know the jazz style. This change of rythm works like an opening and allows a form of equality by slowness.

In the same way, something of the seriousness or of the meaning attached to each work is unburdened by this simple sliding: rrrrrooooouuuuunnnddd, choreographic proposition by Mikaël Phelippeau that takes up again a traditional dance from the Finistère, loses its “folkloric” character; Odile Duboc’s Boléro loses its “historical piece” aspect. When seing the drift effects produced by slowness, one dreams of a United Nations meeting in slow motion, of a soccer match in slow motion — to do one’s shopping or to eat in slow motion — in order to perceive what unnoticed zones, what invisible reflexes are activated, what relations of power, what doxa are thus unveiled.

Subsidiary question : is the Dancing Museum a dancing unmuseum or an undancing museum ?


Slow down: roadworks
What experience do we have of slow motion ? Cinema, mainly, where it is used for exaggerating an action, pointing out a detail, decomposing a movement. It’s a special effect, grandiloquent or pedagogic, a surplus of meaning. The slow motion proposed that night — applied to works which were not conceived for that speed — doesn’t show better, it exhibits (the place, the audience).What it reveals concerns as much the choreography itself as its mode of appearance, and its relation to the institution exhibiting it.

Contrary to the sometimes exhausting effect of the evenings welcoming a series of choreographic propositions (which seek more the vital overflowing, the impression of creative chaos than intercourse or reflexivity) the challenge of slow motion allows a real gaze upon what is being constructed. The accumulation, the value effect linked to accumulation (one could say the supermarket effect) is defused. The slow motion isn’t a special effect anymore, but a true operator of vision, a prism. It operates a beating between the concept of museum and that of dance, it slips into it like an interspace: either the dancers, by slowing down, are changing themselves into sculptures, into museum objects, either they are sculptures coming to life, and joining the living state of dance.


PlansStrange to enter a room and discover that the dancers are already in motion; they didn’t wait for us. One takes place where one can, sitting or standing against the wall, feeling one’s way in, stepping on some people’s feet, bumping into invisible figures. Behind, next to a door, a crowd is gathering. Other people want to get inside. As for the dancers, they follow their choreography (one has to anticipate their moves, not to get in their way).

Uneasy feeling at first, close to what one experiences when entering a cinema after the film has already started. The idea that it has begun already, and that it will continue afterwards (some shows lasting six hours, it is almost impossible to follow them from beginning to end) creates a non-literary relation to the work: one doesn’t grasp it in its totality anymore, but by fragments. The result is closer to rhe enlargment of a painting than to the slow motion in film. But it is the spectator who does the focusing. To quote the title of Julien de Kerviler’s novel: “the perspectives change at every step“. To pass from one room to another amounts to practise editing or cut-up. By placing oneself at the threshold of two spaces, one can switch from one to another (or even include them in a same vision); vary the shots, get closer, adjust the focus, turn around.

Maybe at another scale, seen from above, the museum would be a sculpture, a work in perpetual change; volumes getting thicker or more fluid. And the unique archive of that museum, a drawing showing the whole of the circuits that were performed (“Nothing will have happened / Only the place / except perhaps / A constellation”).

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