The eye and the body

In our performances, nothing is meant to last.  The actions and the images do not stop calling the reality they propose into question:  the truth they offer is plural, like fragments of our personalities attempting to introduce something anomalous into the heart of what is certain.

In our performances nothing is obvious - except the insistence of what is suggested.  The gestures, the actions, the displacements are all derived from pulsations and phantasms of which the staging is above all else a drawing into form, a clarification of sense (so that what is obscure may indeed permeate our understanding), an organization of what is visible (such that the impalpable appears graspable).

From the beginning, our central references have belonged to the domain of the eye.
They are to be regarded with the awareness of a painter or cinematographer, such that the tutelary ascension is key.  Vertical dreamers, architects of imbalance, reformers of anamorphosis, visionaries hunting the void, delirious in black and white….

One day, it seemed to us that if we had to identify our precursors, it was beyond any sense of paradox that they originate from the world of visual arts and not from theater or dance.

If we had to search for an exact equivalent of the sentient principle underlying our gestural world, and define the unrest that leads us to the identity of what we do not know about who we are, we found an anticipated echo, a source both luminous and black, in the work of Hans Bellmer.

In acknowledging this association, we recognize in him that thing toward which we endlessly return, the ambiguous analogies, inexplicable fusions, superimpositions, transferences, convergences, the rhythmic contaminations… and the way the face has of spreading across the body, undoing and recomposing its volumes, but also how the body may say through a knee what the mouth will not disclose, or through the stomach what the ear does not want to hear.
Revealing these unutterable aspects and motifs, Bellmer’s images act as a screen for the body, a screen on which the vertiginous experience of man’s phantasms are harbored and endlessly escape him.

 

^{Patrick Bonté • 1994}