Videodrome : Jessica Fenlon
RE: Memory (2)
Premiere
Choreography: Jeanine Durning, with and for Jennifer Keller and Gwen Ritchie
Music: Jules Maxwell
Video Technology Operation: Dwenda Mosley and Jessica Fenlon
Costume Organization: Jennifer Keller and Gwen Hunter Ritchie
Lighting Design: Scott Nelson
1.
There are no sets of marks to hit. There is no score to be owned. Sol Lewitt's ghost moves the levers in the booth for us.
Fuck Mozart. Throw away the particular score. This is not church, there is no perfect. The choreographer is not the master conductor dictating. There are no mistakes. The choreographer sets up a series of rules by which actions are made. If-thens. Decisions on the fly.
Performer as peer rather than parrot.
Throw away the notion of performer as articulating exactly the same thing every show. Throw away the notion of masterpiece. Throw away the notion of fame achieved through manufacture of the appropriately-consumed object.
2.
The rumble of a launch. Sharp rhythm, the dialogue of hands against metal. Chairs smack.
This pair in i-thou relationship with each other. This pair the "i" in the i-thou relationship with the audience.
Ritual, performance. Doll leading doll. Who leads?
Conscious mind and unconscious mind, which one wins? The burble of conscious and unconscious. Is there a victor? Is it an argument? Is it a dialogue?
They begin seated, facing the audience, next to each other. Later they sit next to each other, facing the audience, and turn to face each other. They will end sitting across from each other, the chairs having been moved throughout the piece.
Gestures pass back and forth. Gestures accumulate. One dancer articulates, the other mirrors, sends it back. The gesture becomes an object passed back and forth.
The magnification of the figure by the video projection. The repetition of the camera's capture and projection ::: capture and projection ::: two video cameras have sight lines within the piece ::: each camera a stand-in for the audience ::: the projector a stand-in for what the audience sees or thinks they see.
audio out, video out: they dance in silence, bare feet providing the rhythm, smack and slap on the floor ... their breathing, the punctuation of their bellies, the focus of each dancer on the other ...
Documenting this work -- a perspectival dance of fixed camera projection/capture game, a series of mirrors, a three-dimensional space flattened into a 2-dimensional piece and a particular timeline.
Here is a performance that exists in 3D space and time, in this defined space - now I capture threads from within the space in the tapes recording the camera live-feed work. Now I capture the performance from outside the space (video not shown in this essay because I am writing from inside the work of art).