DD DORVILLIER
human future dance corps

Observing dance, the other, and the world, at the rhythm of plants and rocks, requires a different sense of time. Through these Untitled landscapes I wish to center this patient mineral-vegetable speed in all aspects of my research and making.

 

Untitled landscapes is an evolving artistic project, a space and a time dedicated to cultivating a sustainable personal artistic practice, taking into account the rural setting in which I now live. If dance is the place where myself and my collaborators meet, our pseudo-archeological process involves writing, reading, filming, drawing, doing site visits, interviewing “local experts” of those sites, talking, observing the landscape, and practicing outdoors. This interweaving of practices leads to performances and other public renderings, and gives space to practicing and learning about our own dances together.

 

The contrast between my current rural village life in Burgundy (France) and years of artistic development in the bustling cultural centers of New York and later Paris has been an important catalyst: slowing down enough to consider the importance of dancing and making in a context where “culture” means “growing things”. I understand the importance of my in-between position, as I move freely between the vestiges of Dracy an abandoned medieval village by the cliffs above; and the dance studio La Corvette, in our garden, below. 

 

The idea of Untitled landscapes emerged after time spent dancing and reflecting amongst the ruins of Dracy[1]. In this place I imagined a meeting between two gentle geniuses who's work and lives have inspired me enormously, the movement artist Simone Forti and the landscape architect Gilles Clément. Their fictional encounter confounds origins, histories, geographies. It renews my perspective on place and belonging. Dracy is a public place that I identify with, but which does not belong to me. In this place I feel that I – and anyone else who listens there – belong to the soil, to the plants, to the rocks, to the air, to the birds.

 

The extended temporality and the open structure of Untitled landscapes frame a desire to develop and practice differently. I wish to contextualize my questions around dance in more planetary, and at the same time more local ways. Moving between the kindred frameworks that are the abandoned village of Dracy, Gilles Clément's Jardin en mouvement[2], and Simone Forti's Logomotion[3] generates a dynamic and personally relevant environment to grow my artistic practice into uncharted directions.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[1]              Established in 1285 then definitively abandoned in 1420, Dracy was a village of about one hundred inhabitants. After several archeological digs between 1965 and 1977 the site and its walls are often hidden by the vegetation. The villagers of the Commune of Baubigny (where I live) take on clearing away the overgrowth once or twice a year.

[2]             Le Jardin en mouvement (The Moving Garden) is a concept created by Gilles Clément to designate both a type of garden where plant species can develop freely and, more generally, a garden philosophy that redefines the role of the gardener, centering observation, and following an ethos of cooperating with nature.

[3]             Simone Forti’s Logomotion is an improvisational dance/narrative form wherein movement and words spring spontaneously from a common source.