Fillod
Ship building in a kleinbottle - 1999 - 2000
Performance après une collaboration sur un cargo de la marine marchande
Collaboration entre une danseuse/chorégraphe et une artiste. Le lieu originel de cette rencontre est un cargo de la marine marchande naviguant vers le cercle polaire. Le travail engagé au cours de ce voyage-laboratoire s’est poursuivi au sein de l’architecture du Fresnoy, studio national des arts contemporains. Ship building in a kleinbottle prolonge, par sa recherche sur les corps et leur rapport au territoire, des questions de physique visuelle et de physique corporelle.
Performance vivant de l’incarnation du lieu de sa présentation en son interaction avec la lumière à son crépuscule. A chaque représentation tous les collaborateurs s’investissent à redéfinir au cours d’une période de travail préliminaire, la continuité du projet.
Une performance à sentir. Un voyage de tous les sens.
“Le passage a commencé, et le bateau un fragment détaché de la terre, s’en est allé solitaire et rapide comme une petite planète. Autour d’elle les abysses du ciel et de la mer se rencontrent en une inatteignable frontière. Une grande solitude circulaire bouge avec elle, ne changeant jamais et n’étant jamais la même, toujours monotone et toujours imposante.”
Le nègre de Narcisse - Conrad
Ship building in a kleinbottle is a performance from a collaboration between a dancer/choreographer and a visual artist. The space of the first meeting was a freighter sailing to the artic circle. The performance is the continuation of this first laboratory-travel through the architecture of le Fresnoy (Bernard Tschumi). Ship building in a kleinbottle kept developing and researching on the body and its relationship to space, questioning visual physics and body physics.
Ship building in a kleinbottle is a performance embodied by the space of its presentation, interacting with the light at twilight. At each performance the collaborators redefine the continuity of the project through a preliminary work period. The performance is still anchored at its original point but yet spinning as a mutant entity. Itself but somehow detached.
What is still? What is moving? What is connecting everything? How are they interacting? A water surface. Turn around a light puddle and again.
Each performance has been performed at the hinge of day and night, at this precise moment where the light almost invisibly shifts. Many of the video or slide projections were turned on from the beginning of the performance but could only be seen half way through to where the daylight lost its intensity.
The performance started with the end and finished with the beginning.
We built the floor with the participation of the audience, redefining the open space of their gaze. The floor was black and shiny; reflecting. As the night came, an extremely slow fade in of spot light showered the floor; lifting it up from the ground. How to make the space move?
The performance was a journey within perception. A perception contextualized by our experience of a freighter. The space, the light, the sound, the images… everything was tuned to create a shift in the physical perception of our given reality. The performance created a state wherein the audience was taken in a continuum of motion.
Sound wise we played with sound wave, creating an apparent uniform texture that would compose a specific partition in each individual ear depending on the movement of each individual in the performing space.
" the sub world…is an environment which registers on our perception at the level of sensation, displaced effect, a suspicion of the other existence. In a similar way sub bass frequencies can register as tremors in the chest and stomach, rather than audible sound." David Toop.
The movement developed for the performance was inspired by the ship activity and the continuous motion experience within the ship. Perpetual motion. The motion of the arms under its own weight…barely perceptible.
The force, a factor like the rolling kills repetition. There is no repetition, just the illusion of the repetition; a coherent dynamic defined by a specific context.
To be embraced by the motion, to let the motion embrace you, to let the motion perform you.
As we came back on land, so used to this perpetual motion bedding each of our action and thought, we were struck to realize that only the leaves of the trees were moving. The perspective on which a perception builds its coherency depend so much of its context. And since our thoughts are quiet colored by a context it was interesting to observe what remained unchanged within both situation and what transformed.
A flag on the roof of a castle. One says; the flag is moving, the other says; the wind is moving. The master's answer, neither one nor the other, this is you as an observing spirit that is moving.
To experience consciously the subtle but radical shift of the moment when a person 'falls' asleep. To be at the hinge of those two space. To experience this moment of autonomy.
'The dusk is the breach between two worlds; it is the door to the unknown'.
Concept - Christelle Fillod
Collaboration Christelle Fillod/Christine De Smedt
Son et musique - Gary Hill
Light - Gerd Van Looy