vrijdag 29 november 2019

double perfweek: Jetlag / Pipe

just off the plane for an encounter with B

JETLAG#2

Greeted by what was going to be a volcanic eruption we arrived just in time for the JetLag#2 at the buktapaktop, an encounter of Korean and Brussels-based performers... The volcano caught fire quite a wasy down the slope and had ro be carried out into the rain to avoid the toxic fumes putting an early end to the encounter... Lucky for us the two volcanists had a reserve mini-volcano at hand which they set off for a festive beginning of procedures...   



  i had the luck to be right at the window where the fist apparition from Seoul incanted a text I can not translate, but anyway it was garbled by the fact that the reader was being entwined as to were, so as to make coherent reading a difficult feat, in addition to darkness, rain, glaring light and then the puffed cloud of fine flour on window pane prepared with pictogram or symbol denoting one thing or another, probably explained by the illegible text and presented garbled as a means of communication quite foreign to us... Or so I thought... But it did make an impression even without explanatory context... 






Next was a video of a performance, in which a group of smartly dressed revellers commenced to bite each other sensuously and profusely, repeatedly and serially - no sound but one could surmise the kind of groans and squeals as if one were there oneself, feeling the pain and perhaps the delight as blood was drawn... Quite a constellation if you ask me, but the spades which were lingering in the background initiated the second part in which the group proceeded to the forest to entomb themselves up to their necks in soil, earth and perhaps immobility in order not to devour each other entirely... Who knows, latter day vegetarian vampires perhaps...





Speaking of ritual, the next offering was quintessentially easter, with a small shrine of joss-sticks commencing proceedings in which the protagonist priest donned electronic neck dress in order to manipulate his surroundings.... We the participants were give reflective discs, and one laser beam came down straight, to be joined respectively by the next and next until four enclosed a space in cardinal terms, framed strictly but then defected by mirrors and caught by ourselves, redirected to each other and creating a visual conversation of web-like inference, in some cases a beam would be deflected numerous times across the room, in other instances shared by more than one mirror, multiplying the possibilities... This all in relatively calm and speechless enjoyment of each others company.




Silent was also the bird-man who stripped down to basic shorts & shirt to slowly and deliberately mount a plinth made of slats and tape, on unsteady and undulating ground, to balance slowly upward, slightly shaky but well in control, to finally stand upon his perch, extending wings for balance, moving slowly from one observation angle to the next, to then equally slowly and deliberately retire.... This all surrounded by concentrated silence... The audience was equally involved and perhaps even strained, tense to see it through without mishap.... For once bird-man dropped his perch, it broke up in its constituent parts, making obvious how fragile it was and how amazingly proficient this quiet balancing act in fact was... 























An enigmatic video of close up skin extrusions was shown, abstract and electronically manipulated to identify certain regions on interest, to whom? To what? A strange application of facial recognition technology perhaps to identify just that question... 
 
Two dancers did a showcase intro view into a breakdance hiphopperrave suite, dressed in the obligatory jogging outfits, energetically showing their wares before launching into a more abstract and structural performance of an extremely slowed down version of a decisive move, synchronised perfectly and reversible... Like robots  but human, breaking int a sweat and conversing with the audience - reminding us to keep in touch with the human rather than being fascinated by technical prowess... 




It was a very interesting a sympathetic encounter with a certain eastern calm presiding over the whole proceeding - a restfulness we lack here in the west often...
great stuff! many thanks to our Korean visitors!



same week different venue:

Pipa/Dortrecht (part 1 of 4)


This time I made it to Dortrecht, where I had promised to participate in the first night of boredom, but couldn't get my car started and was therefor a no-show, unnoticed artist... Tho my text was read at the selected site... This time I got there but went astray thinking the venue was at the ( co-) organization Lodge 222... When in fact it was in Pictura...















On time even, with a breathless realist to greet us all, blowing his breath into black garbage bags (or bin-liners you might call them) and adding a pellet of shit to an invisible text-fragment on the wall... His eyes were watering behind goggles, his floppy hat reminiscent of a walkabout... A huff and a puff... And the urban intervention videos in the library/barspace were intriguing... Keeping the passersby from passing by but standing still to block other possible passers to pass by... Lots of south american stuff... Interesting ones, too much to recount here, this being just a subjective passer-by's account...


In the back room a dance-duo was just winding up a paint by gun number... They would react to the public that would react by squirting their pistols laden with green ink either on the dancing targets, the prepared canvasses or the suspended pages... All beginning with virginal white but now spatterd pollock-colorfield....





 In the main room a ladder protruded from a hole in the floor... Basement emmitting strange reverb-sounds while a girl diappeared down the ladder... I followed suit, coming upon an ensemble of guitares resting on their amps... Swinging along as it were... No player, no wind of funny electonics, just the presence of each others company emitting a slow sine-curve of reverb now and again, decaying before becoming feedback... Quite an achievement if you ask me... Cutting it fine just along the threshold of  distortion.... 

While in the next cavernous space a collector was arranging his collection of ... Well... Things similar, the significance of which did not really reveal itself to me, but which fascinated none the lass and had my sympathy even if only for the mere audacity to present these boxes of things neatly arranged in the basemen as a statement of no sort I could fathom... Perhaps there was still something that was going to happen, or associations that would become clear when all had been laid out... 


I would return, I said to myself when re-emerging from the hole in the floor just as someone was taking potshots of the space... I decided to do a little walkabout myself, to feed the parking meter or rather to repark the car in a less expensive area... Passing by the breathless crocodile hunter, now having produced the outlines of a word or two with the pellets I surmised to be rabbit-doo or something more exotic... (kangaroo?) The black begs were amassing too... Filled with carbon dioxic sweat and dizziness.



out in the town my instructions said that I was to turn left if a sound came from the right, so I heard sounds as they were convenient, and enjoyed the rather quaint old town with lots of boats, which is always good in my book... By the time I got back the breathless Australian had been able to spell ... the real... what precisely I don't know and couldn't ask because he was still exhaling into the bags... The place began looking like an upside-down Duchamp... 


The squirt-gun action completed it's second phase, with purple dye this time, making it more Monet and giving the shooting an air of spring, if not the right of spring, the dance being a bit relegated to the action... I would have preferred if they had forgotten about the audience even if they were taking pot-shots...









 But the evening was saved by a gaggle of girls in garish costume, swimming costume, no, bodysuit like cyclists costume, of bobsled perhaps, something competitively sporty, shiny, dynamic and synthetic... There trick girls proceeded to depose copious amounts of plastic on the floor... Household plastic we all know and have come to cherish in our lazy efficiency, throw away society... They began the laborious job of sorting out the diverse types of plastic as we do when the refuse collection is imminent, or garbage truck coming to get it... Once it had all been sorted, or just before perhaps, the girls started playing with the stuff, making at first slight rustling noises as in a dense forest but getting bolder and bolder to more percussionist tendencies to end up in a kaleidoscopic lighting throwing trash and themselves about in flashes of fancy plastic sculptural instances, ending in a heaving volcano...





Resurfacing slowly they began moving the mountain of plastic waste in a sort of pincer movement with their legs, clearing the chaos while churning up a menacing mount... Sympathetically, sensuously, but inexorably towards the increasingly alarmed audience against the wall... Endin up by delving some onlookers under the barrage of poly propylene, ethylene and trichloride combination...
Party's over, time to make away with all this junk.


Geen opmerkingen: