DD DORVILLIER
human future dance corps

Dance is the archeologist of dance, digging into dance, by dancing to the bone.

To create a dance situated in the here and now, the dancer digs back and forth in the sediments of memory and its landslides: from place to place, she moves the memory of gestures, people and stones. She dances the ground to the bone, until perhaps she finds a piece of carved wood, a primitive idol, a small piece of presence...

This year a series of dances arose from a dream while working on Landscape Stories. After naming and describing the dances from the inside, and writing them, I understood that they were familiar to me, as if they had always been there. Yet they would not have emerged without the group practices, site visits, and interviews, that have been taking place since the onset of making Landscape Stories within the Untitled landscapes dispositif. These dance scores serve multiple uses, as practices, research tools, and choreographies in their own right. They are at the core of Dance is the archeologist, or an idol in the bone.

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In my current process I'm observing how a quasi-antagonistic dynamic between speaking and dancing is at work. From this friction emerges a third “thing”, perceived from the outside, something I cannot control.

For the audience (and the dancer too) dancing and speaking, and the body in a space, inevitably produce images, ambiguous meanings, presences, third “things”. Sometimes the experience and what is “understood” of it, seem to be at odds. I see this as an opportunity, a pleasurable and resonant gap full of potential.

If dance has persistent disappearance as a basic condition of its existence, then it implies the appearance of things, or perhaps even the timeless presence of already completed gestures. As in archeology, we suspect something there, we go digging to reveal it. A dance buried in a dream, appears only after dancing it again. It appears, we write it, send it back through the dreaming of the beholder, time bends.

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Sedimentation and digging, poetry, landscape. The synergies of stone, language, and movement are at work, carrying in the body, fragments of Untitled landscapes.

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Language and orality, tenacious efforts at peace despite brutal war, a constant flooding of internal images, including my own, haunt my current dancing. There's a need to use the body in an immediate way, and to move and sense the lightness and power of the mutual gaze of audience and performer, in this case me. There's a need to use the voice, relying on the complicity between movement and utterance. And there's a need to situate dancing in the present, to cultivate its delicate capacity to create space for listening and observing differently.

Some previous works that attempt to reconcile understanding and experience in different ways:

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In this assisted solo with dancer/choreographer Elizabeth Ward (begin at 04:30) I grapple with sound and my own body as conceptual objects, as I interact and negotiate concrete actual objects. Multiple and often simultaneous images, charged spaces, and emptinesses emerge out of this instant relational composition. I aim to make it possible for the viewer to be in their own process of observation and understanding through stillnesses, graphic connections with mundane objects, or impulsive actions in the space and with the architecture.

This duo with the poet/performer Quim Pujol (begin at 14:05) brings forth a passage to the spoken word, as a problem and a reason to rejoice. Words situate, replace, derail, re-present, re-new, play with, movement, dancing, and performing – and with the problem of theatrical of representation. With humor, words gradually dismantle a certain understanding of things. They establish slippery images that in turn become motors of the dance, which in turn flips the sense of the words.