right here, Frédéric Valabrègue, Le cercle nautique de Pékin, 2005
Dance starts with basics. The moderns always deal with basics i.e. rediscovering the foundations of a practice. This offers neither a goal nor an aim, certainly not a function. Work shows work, or rather the workings of a machine that is supposed to snatch a moment beyond its bounds. The real story of a dance by Martine Pisani is about showing what makes it possible, how it moves within the rules of a game. In order for there to be a ‘right here’, a territory needs to be marked out.
Since her first choreographic piece, she has been emphasizing an ensemble of relationships: among the dancers, between the dancers and the audience, between both of these groups and the performance space. The word ‘event’ or ‘performance’ comes to mind, recalling what took place à la Judson Church around Yvonne Rainer and David Gordon. What it is that happens, what we are committed to make happen. The stage does not differ from the studio. It is the studio. The audience is not appealed to – no such demagogy – but subsumed. It does not represent a separate world, a separate sphere. It participates in what takes shape before its eyes.
I have often read Martine Pisani’s dance titles: l’air d’aller, là où nous sommes and now Slow down, like markings at the top of a musical score, or parentheses used by playwrights to give actors their theatrical impulse. The titles suggest a tempo that is also a state. There is an initial attempt to find out what sparks movement, what its inwardness might be. It has nothing to do with mime, since this state is not illustrated. It does not get translated into motions that serve as signs. This is not about stylizing, but about following an impulse all the way to its dilution. Nothing gets halted at the sign stage, since this dance is a continuous extension.
Martine Pisani has always worked with performers who are not necessarily full-time dancers. Similarly to Robert Bresson’s contrast between “models” and actors, she looks for people who are flexible enough to be “sculpted”, not by Bressonian light, but by improvisation. She selects her non-dancers based on a unique quality of presence that comes through from the improvisation work. This is not merely about looking for characters – although ideally there is diversity and complementarity amongst them. These people are close to us, anonymous, their features barely pronounced. The choreography draws upon them in order to set up an ensemble of raw and superfluous gestures that a certain kind of body ideology would rather do away with.
Martine Pisani does not work by purging, but rather by collecting and redesigning the so-called bits or scraps of body language. She strips gestures of any foreseeable goal in order to highlight an individual’s presence and to let their substance resonate. She shifts presence. And by shifting it, she highlights it.
These states and affects are taken for what they are, gathered, repeated, and thereby give rise to situations that sometimes verge on the comic. Much the way that burlesque film builds up to gags, Pisani’s dance leads to the unexpected, to the awaited tiny coups de theatre. The audience expects these converging moments. Choreography, of course, delights in intercepting the very expectations it has created. The spectator’s main question is thus: “how are they going to pull through? i.e. how is this series of sketches going to make sense, even for just a moment?” This dance borrows one of theatre’s prods, dramatic interest, but makes it serve a seemingly absurd “cause”: the elementary suspense that holds us within the bounds of the stage and the present. “And what are we going to do now that we’re lost onstage? What pose are we supposed to adopt?” This is a nod to the theatrical preliminaries of Beckett, who drew upon the burlesque and played with the audience’s expectations once extrinsic meaning is let go.
The choreographic works are based on contrasting wager: là où nous sommes is a montage of inter-echoing sequences, while l’air d’aller plays upon transition and unfolding. In the choreographer’s words: “By form, I mean a way of interrelating all the elements that arise throughout the work process.” Slow down for six dancers is clearly the piece where preliminary decisions – where the structure – are most present. Martine Pisani is interested in what is out of vision, or off-field. The main wager is due to the fact that all of the dancers are onstage. None of them leave unless it’s to hide behind a movable panel, a fragile concealment that allows presence to be glimpsed, and that serves as a transition or a “magic slate”.
Out of six dancers only five appear, in the vein of Ryoan-Ji, the Zen garden where only six out of seven stones are visible from any viewpoint. The different “scenes”: making noise while an extra walks on stage, imitating an invisible dancer, memorizing a philosophical text about memory, draw our attention not to what is hidden, but to what seems to be missing, its presence showing up indirectly. The dancers are surrounded by a backstage area, an overall off-field that is constantly affecting their actions. Much like a painter or a photographer who works within the limits of a frame, or uses a wall to derive something dynamic, Martine Pisani makes space tangible. She turns the invisible barrier between the stage and the world into a passageway where interaction is possible.
Since this dance focuses on the desire to make present, to embody a timeless and temporary “hic et nunc”, why not carry this notion of presence further, and probe its meaning? Is it the emanation of a supposed “interiority”? The presence explored in Slow down does not stem from a character (such as when we say that an actor has presence). If we widen the scope, presence appears through its opposites: absence, disappearance. Think of those moving curtains in Bajazet. Presence is a body plus a track, a trail. What happens when these get dissociated and both elements, the visible and the invisible, are allowed to play out their scores on their own? The rhetoric of hide-and-seek – thank goodness for rhetoric – is what enables presence to become perceptible, not demystified, but explored by way of poetry, humor and play.