Gymnastics of the mind
Residencies
- 08.08 > 13.08.2022
- 28.06 > 04.07.2021
1. How a book can be a stage
In uncertain times when live performances still seem a distant prospect, dancer and choreographer Femke Gyselinck has turned to another, two-dimensional medium: she has made the book her stage. However, a book functions differently from a stage. What translation is needed if you want to capture movement in a book? If dance is a form of language, what might its building blocks look like? Starting from these questions, she develops a dance alphabet with the paper page as the space to be choreographed. The time the reader takes to leaf through the book determines the duration of the “performance.”
In the research project Gymnastics of the Mind, Femke depicts her dancing analysis of the alphabet in a photographic series. The poses seek a balance between stylized movement and carelessness. How can a moving body find physical expressiveness and give shape to the building blocks of language? The starting point is the alphabet, a collection of letters, from which Femke shifts the tension between the concreteness of representation to the abstractness of pure physicality. Translating movement into the two-dimensional page seems paradoxical by definition. To tackle this contradiction, an interdisciplinary dialogue is entered into for the purpose of the publication. Filmmaker Robbrecht Desmet explores the photographic representation of gestures and forms in the tension between movement and pose. This relationship is concretized in the presentation as a sequence: the image freezes, the variation creates rhythm.
2. How a book can be transformed by the stage
Following the publication of the dance alphabet, Femke Gyselinck intends to use this alphabet, a collection of building blocks, as the starting point for her next stage creation with dancers Sue Yeon Youn and Luka Švajda.
How do you unfold movement research that has ended up in book form back into the form of a live performance? The eclectic composer and musician Liesa Van der Aa has been invited to give this spatial translation a musical voice.
The visual language of the dance alphabet develops into a choreography that moves between abstraction and representation, identity and otherness. Three dancers perform the choreography with three different accents, like a ‘dialect’ of the same formal language. Liesa van der Aa translates this choreography into a graphic score: every variation and intensity in the dance becomes audible in her music and use of voice. The movement language evolves from formal abstraction to ecstasy and resonates with the score, which moves along the boundaries of classical strings and contemporary pop music.
The performance challenges the idea of compositional choreography and mutual artistic dependence in order to experience each other’s language firsthand. This intense exchange between choreography and musical composition culminates in a feedback loop with unpredictable results.