Double-bill: Outcome & Reverse Discourse

Info

Outcome

Concept and choreography: Manuel Pelmuș
Coordinator: Eduard Gabia
Light design: Alexandros Raptis
With: Filip Stoica
Production: The National Center for Dance Bucharest (CNDB)

“Outcome” by Manuel Pelmuș is one of the most daring choreographic works created in the early 2000s in Romanian contemporary dance. Outcome was seen as a kind of short circuit, a shock, which for many of the young choreographers and critics of that time produced a disruption of the French aesthetics, which had really left its mark on Romanian choreography after the project “La Danse en Voyage”, organized in Bucharest in the early 90’s.

Manuel Pelmuș considers that this is the first piece that debates what choreography means for him, the body’s standing in society, artistic and political influences, all in which “a manner of choreographic thinking materializes, closer to the performance of visual arts and certain conceptual searches in choreography”. The artists talks about Outcome as a work that informed and influences everything he did afterwards, even if in different forms or setups:

Outcome started a form of critical reflection towards the means of artistic production and the conventions and context in which they take place. The main merit (if not all of it) for the work is Eduard Gabia’s. We were friends and, one day, I told him about my idea. Edi was very open and pervious, he fully understood the artistic proposal, even if the concept was quite uncommon for him, but for me as well. What followed was a period of rehearsals and discussions, during which the piece evolved naturally, supported also by Edi excellent performance abilities. It was not a working process in the traditional sense, one in which I showed some moves and he tried to do them as well as he could. It was more of a process of accumulation, in which we fed each other ideas and feelings, adding movement details as we went along, and finally everything came together as Outcome. I remember that we talked about the relationship between object and subject, between presence and expression, between body and context.

(Manuel Pelmuș, 2020)

Reverse Discourse

Concept and choreography: Ioana Marchidan
Sound design: Alexandru Suciu
Video projections and poster: Hermina Stanciulescu
Light design: Hermina Stanciulescu
With: Ioana Marchidan
Production: LINOTIP

In “Reverse Discourse” I wanted to provoke emotion without mediating the gaze. To challenge the public to recall their own experiences or those transmitted and retransmitted, perpetually perpetuated by external factors, whether we are talking about people or the media. I used the body as a means of visual connection to an absurd dialogue. A bodily dialogue exposed in lines with distinct temporalities, which almost never intersect. An organic dialogue that exposes the dominator-submissive perspectives in multiple hypostases that outline the past and the present. A somatic dialogue that animates the traumas stored in our collective and individual memory. A visceral dialogue about the assumption of power and its exploitation in predominantly dictatorial, manipulative directions.

Ioana Marchidan

“Reverse discourse” is what the title says. An inverted speech. Depersonalized. Offered naked. Fragile. Intimate. A performance about body politics in which Ioana Marchidan short-circuits the collective body memory, identifying and bringing to the surface deeply rooted gestures, in order to unarchive them and decompose them through a body slide towards an abstract choreography. This cataloging and re-editing of the memory of submission, of the suppression and repression of the meanings of gestures, integrates the public as a participant in the dialogue, as a submissive observer.

It’s interesting to follow in this micro performance the body movements before the gestures take shape. The inventory of gestures comes as an oscillation between submission and oppression until the body gives up on the difference between the two and gets caught up in the energy of change between them.

The choice to construct discourse in this form, a naked back in a space that oscillates from dark abyss to video projections, implies vulnerability. And vulnerability implies an assumed fragility, which allows focusing on the essence of the message: the destructive force of abuse of power.

Special mentions

The center is where you dance. The center can be anywhere.

Production presented at LINOTIP as part of the CNDB Itinerant – a season of performances in other venues in Bucharest and around the country.