Concept and performance: Meri Pajunpää & Simon Verheylesonne
Performance combining dance and visual art where the audience follows closely the journey of two performers, who are constantly creating and reshaping an artificial landscape, only made out of fabric. They attempt to represent an idealized interpretation of nature.
“While taking the audience into our imaginary world we are shifting their perception on what is taking shape in front of them.
The confrontation with untouched nature is seen by us as the ultimate spiritual experience. We want to see what happens when we transfer that almost religious admiration towards nature into the artificial material that we are shaping on stage. Throughout the history, humans have had the need to make representations of nature, as if it was something apart from us. We are not separate from nature, we are nature. This contradiction gives the frame for our work, as we play between being the viewer, the storyteller and the subject of the situation.
In history the nature has also served as the source for stories and myths. Storytelling has opened the window for people to find mystery within the natural. Fabrics contain the qualities of concealing and revealing. They also carry a potential for mystery in them. We are fascinated by how through using these elements we can create small universes with limited space and material.
Our relation with the material we use is determined according to each desired situation. In some scenes the fabric is given a sacred value in order to perform ritual-like actions, in others it serves as a playful object in which the movement can leave traces. One of our questions is, how is a human body relating itself to the nature around itself, and what happens if this 'nature' is constantly shifting? How can we embody this transformation through movement? If nature is in constant transformation, then movement is the one unifying thing that is present in all organic forms. From the movement within a cell to the movement within a human body to the movement within an ecosystem to the movement within a galaxy.”
Performances on 10th and 11th of May, 7.00 pm at K41, rue Keyenveld, 41 1050 Brussels
