Slow down those revealing signs, David Bernadas, 2002.11.13 Mouvement.net
With up-beat detachment, Martine Pisani underlines the deadlocks that overwhelm us, the drives that stop us and stand in our way.
Martine Pisani doesn’t delve into the spectacular. Think of sans, the irresistible male trio where she did away with artifices of representation through humor and detachment. With Slow down she goes even further, developing personal research and questioning the limits of presence, what it means to ‘be there’ onstage. Absence, effort, concentration, weight, fatigue, speed, elan, idleness… She works with a larger group than usual so that the choreography remains attentive to these signs, which are sometimes quite tenuous, and give off a sense of presence especially by means of facial expressions. “The face as a mediator in the encounter with ‘the other’,” she points out. “It is always bare, and yet secret, strange, as though absorbed by the inside.”
"Slow down". Prey to clashing drives, the six performers seem to struggle with this directive. They look around, they waver, they brood. The stage is bare, stripped of décor and dramatic progression. The performers take turns disappearing behind a mysterious black panel. They thus each seem be conveying their own uniqueness while at the same time they come across as replaceable and interchangeable, since only five of them ever appear at a time. In a delicate exercise of reunion, whether the dancers are lining up for a ground-contact improvisation or else humming pop standards in chorus, there is always the same startling funniness, the same up-beat joy.