Innovation was at the first perceived as the mistake, Natasa Godevic, Novi List 2008.11.13
The performance Blink, choreographed by Martine Pisani, performed by the Zagreb Dance Company in ZeKaeM
Watching the performers of the Zagreb Dance Company we have the impression that it is much easier for them to create a show which demonstrates their formal virtuosity, than to create a work whish questions the conventionality of well known choreographic fashions. The guest from France, Martine Pisani, tried on the contrary to untie the loops of the known sequences of movement and unlearn the Zagreb dance company in its newest ZeKaeM premiere from the things they learn or already know and in which they feel secure and crafted, in the same time encouraging them to try to find a little poetic mess in every gesture they are using. Why do we need chaos, incompleteness, mistake, dissonance? Because the art itself is basically connected with the unpredictability and random inventions, and not only with the army drill.
The liberation of the objects from their immobility
The starting point for this creation, according to the booklet, was the Bergson’s book Matter and Memory (1896). Even though nor the choreographer, nor the dramaturge Saša Božić are not going in the detail discuss on Bergson, stating him only as an inspiration source, let us remark that it is a philosopher which in the mentioned book wrote that „ he believes equally in the reality of the objects as in the reality of the spirit“, trying to delete the division between those terms and parallely describing the perception as a specific means of selecting, even impoverishing of the true plenitude of the images and sensations. It is important to mention Bergson’s approval of the intuition, in a sense of irrational knowledge which cannot be subdued to any logic or reasonable classification.
Watching the Blink, we can really experience authors’ deep understanding of Bergson, especially the realization of his famous question: „In short, let’s try to connect the objects of our everyday existence, and then to liberate them from its immobility and relinquish them to the vibrations of the movement. “ The dancers are entering the stage from all sides, bringing with them different props ( from the theater fund), they are trying them, trying to change their purpose ( to mantle themselves with an old nylon rug as a fur, to make heroic poses on the little wooden skate, to see a paddle in a long stick, to paint on the floor with the cleaning broom, etc.) or they are trying simply in their way to roll the chosen props in their own way, using a lots of jumps on both, or only one leg, addressing the audience by eventful blinking towards them.
Draining the sponge
The problems arrive when those founded objects appear more lively then the performers: litle rolling stairways acts more autonomly then Andreja Široki, who is smiling absently towards the audience and does not really know what she could do with the liberty of the performing choices. Some of the dancers are offering more interesting solutions of making Metter alive, as Darija Doždor (washing the stage, sunbathing on the long black curtain ), Marko Jastrevski (confound with his rope), Maja Marjančić (narrating with garbage can) or Zrinka Lukčec (refusing that the task of the cleaning of the floor becomes only the task of cleaning). But, all these performers are communicating such an amount of ease that it is starting to exist as the per formative signature of the whole show. The best are Sara Barbieri and Ognjen Vučinić, both of them releasing the threads of their own playfulness, and performing gracefully the duo of draining the sponge and then fast, synchronized, hedonistic travel of hands and foam trough the surface of the stage.
The search for the possibilities which one little blink allows (blink as turning the attention from the world to the self) showed its self as a methodology of creativity that performers are afraid of , as they are afraid of any authoring statement, but at the same time they are passionately drown to it. It is a real pity that Martine Pisani got the chance to work on only one production in Croatia: her ability to point out the awkwardness and misunderstandings as gates from the all known bases of the movements and theories, her courage to hug the mistake as the methodology of the artistic invention should be therapeutically prescribed to the Croatian theater.