We are the products of a long selection process of chemical, biological, and cultural structures that at different levels have interacted for a long time in order to shape the funny process that we are. About which we understand very little, by reflecting on ourselves, by looking at ourselves in the mirror.
The Order of Time, Carlo Rovelli (2018)
Choreography unfolds on a cloud underneath the soil and speculates about time that does not pass, but is contained within the world of things. The world on the cloud underneath the soil is always in a gentle, restrained, continuous movement. Time has lost its direction and unity; affirms the multitude of temporalities and rhythms – of stones people worms and microbes – which by repeating, renewing and rebuilding on the web in a continuous motion, co-create temporary images and events –
on the cloud underneath the soil, things
are rounded and softer, and differences
in surfaces of things are
blurry, always continuing and permeating gaze
Multiplicity of gaze does not diminish the distance only distributes it
prolonging continuing imagining
constant and mutual establishment and annulment of the world through encounters.
Choreography and Performance:
Antonia Dorbić, Marta Krešić, Danijela Renić and Lana Šprajcer
Scenography: Antonia Dorbić & Marta Krešić
Music: Adam Lončar
Photo: Ivan Buvinić, Nina Đurđević
Video: Sindri Ucu
The project was supported by the Cultural Center KNAP and funded by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia.
Critic’s word:
By virtue of mutually bound surfaces in which we look (at each other and them), we too are sitting with them on a cloud, thus invited to dwell in a suspended time-space wherein the image of what is happening has always already begun and hasn’t just yet. The image of the space is ruptured by their specific performativity, while the interlinked optical lenses interrupt the linear unfolding of time that we are spending together.
One of the main problems of this work are multiple and various gazes, as they function as their building material: they are looking at us, we are looking at them, they are looking in the mirror, by looking in the mirror they are speculating about the gaze of an absent dead subject, thus offering me the possibility to both see a parody of the dance lineage that is obsessed with the image of dance in the mirror, and a parody of the narcissistic fixation on the mirror as such; they are positioning those same mirrors in a way that makes us see the reflection in the mirror which returns their gaze back to us; they are also looking at the cameras and setting up the screens to bring their gaze closer to each other, but also to the gaze of other spectators; they are looking at each other without the cynicism they engage in their performance of gender. Such a gaze, devoid of distance, when returned to the audience in such a way, opens up a possibility for the love between them to become the love between the performance and its audience, which I find to be one of the most radical and exciting modes of setting up relations in a performative event. The implication that love is the affect that has the capacity to arise from the encounter of two unknown entities can have radical political consequences, which are exactly the ones we need now.
The performance invites me to redirect my gaze from what is misleadingly offering itself as its subject and problem, but turns out to be otherwise. It invites me to reorient myself from what I think I see or have a desire to see towards what might happen to me; to stay open towards the weirdness of this situation and towards the unpredictability of encountering that which is stranger than the unknown.
A dedication to love, beings and things, Nina Gojić, Kulturpunkt.hr