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"Theater
of Endurance: the nature of Francis Bacon"
We
were inspired by the work of the painter Francis Bacon when composing
Figures in a Landscape in 2002. I must immediately explain that we were
not trying to bring Bacon's paintings to life or translate his aesthetic
into the language of the stage. I was inspired by his oeuvre in the widest
sense, not just by individual paintings. While working on the choreography
I read interviews with Bacon and criticism about his work, especially
Gilles Deleuze's Logique de la sensation (1981).
Many aspects of the nature of Bacon's work fed the design of the stage set
and choreography of "Figures...". One particular feature of his
work, however, connects all the others : the endurance, persistence, and
urgency of the figures he painted.
In Bacon's paintings we find a series of situations which are like a
circus, a weird circus which I call the circus of "quotidian
gymnastics." These are situations in which the body is captured in a
moment of anticipation, of effort - a struggle with everyday objects -
often subjected to the searching or conspiratorial gaze of another figure.
This is the theatricality of persistence. The paintings present us with a
seated body, which is not passive even though it is not in motion. The
body is enduring its own existence. Sitting or standing become problems
for the body to solve, they are no longer demonstrations, gestures, or
calls to action. It's like in the circus, when a juggler or acrobat
circumscribes his movements to keep his objects in motion or keep his
balance on the high wire for no other reason - without question, a cruel
reason - than to persist in the problem of not dropping the objects or
maintaining balance. The spectacle is reduced to zero; just as in the
corrido, the game is to persist in the arena, if possible, with a little
elegance. There is no story developing in Bacon's paintings, no imaginary
world or grand actions depicted, but the endurance of the bodies of those
in them, facing the persistence of objects (taken out of the context of
their ordinary use) or the survival of animals (when we remove them from
their own environment.)
Bacon's paintings helped us immediately discern and experience this
quality of doggedly surviving bodies. We then developed scenes with this
quality.
The first and easiest matter was to take on board the arrangement of
figures that Bacon often uses in his paintings. We were governed by the
principle of multiple views on the stage. For
examples, a figure is sitting on a chair and opposite this figure is
located its counterpart, the observer - one or more - who investigates
this first figure as if researching an isolated object, or a body isolated
on a bed like on an autopsy table. But this still doesn't tell us what the
observed body should do in order to demonstrate its persistence --
although it is obvious that it will not leap off the chair and perform a
series of practiced acrobatics.
When Bacon painted these persistent bodies, he diverged from a certain
painterly approach; he used frottage, which gives rise to the non-organic
movements of the body and the transparency of its material; he used
deformation by separating matter from structure (separating the meat from
the bones, but also separating the set direction of motion from the
muscles); he used black or white splotches to perforate the body, or he
even added directional arrows. We rewrote these approaches into a "poetics
of the body" which has nothing in common
with a visual reproduction of the painterly effects that Bacon achieved,
but which primarily concern the habit of avoiding new and different
distributions of tension and release, lightness and heaviness in the body,
a redefinition of the relationship between muscles, bones, breath, bodily
fluids and nerves - isolation and intensification. This poetics concerns a
certain intensifying and deformation of the kinesthetic input and a
certain multiplication and isolation of bodily events. The particular
characteristics of each individual dancer helped a great deal: Alena's
animal rabidity, the fluid passivity of Ondrej's body, Martin's
tower-body, or Míša's tall, nervous tension.
Finally we arrived at something we can call "the
history of sensations." So for example
on the stage there is an "attack" on one of the performers.
Martin (the victim) was asked to identify with his shadow on the wall, to
imagine and feel that this shadow was lying beneath his body, and then
that it was unfolding along his back. The attackers were to become body
landscapes before a storm, when all of nature is overwhelmed by the
characteristic of lethargy, when nothing moves anymore and the sky clouds
over.... only here and there did their limbs, which had become long blades
of grass in a field, tremble slightly ...
In the end it was necessary to create a specific space for these
persistent figures, not an aesthetic space for their performance, but a body space capable of influencing the sensations, a
landscape. It was essential to have a sloping
stage, where the bodies whether sitting or standing could nowhere find
equilibrium, where acceleration, falls and slides would take on a more
powerful dynamic than a flat stage produces. To this we added a narrow
track on stilts , which the performers could maneuver, but which also
limited them and held them hostage.
It should be obvious that we are very far from reproducing Bacon's
painterly approaches through other (stage) means, but despite this the
viewer can find that the space in our performance is the same as in
Bacon's paintings - a space delineated by circles, a narrow track,
observing figures, violation of equilibrium and falling. But is there any
such thing as a purely painterly approach? When we look at Bacon's work,
or that of De Kooning, or even more obviously at Baselitz, the viewer is
enabled to experience very specific bodily sensations which strictly
speaking have nothing in common with what is visual. If after Pollock
painting has become the trace of a body captured in motion, it is probably
because motion and sensation on the one hand precede the visual, and on
the other hand construct it.
Pierre
Nadaud
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