Meg Stuart’s Violet was the first performance I ever saw and it is still a great inspiration today. At the time, I was enamored by her use of time and intensity. She not only exhausted her dancers, but she exhausted her audience. There was a constant energy exchange between the audience and the performers. The way she created an atmosphere was stunning. When I compare Violet to her other performances, I find that there is a certain philosophy she maintains. For example, her dancers become sculptures or cluster of details. When she slows and accelerates movement, the dance ceases to by a continuum from beginning to start, but rather a piece of art in which one notices the details.
She has inspired my own practice and the way I approach the body. What she inspired most was my approach to movement and time in Skindeep. She inspired me to create an atmosphere rather than a narrative, to engage and immerse my audience in a moving piece of art. I wanted tiny details, and changes in movements to be noticed and contrasted against large and uncontrolled movements.
Stuart questions the notion of time. In an interview (A.Linder, Uncomfortable zones, Spike, 2014) she once stated, “So in my work I let singular movement proposals extend longer than was comfortable and embraced active stillness.” I tried to play with said stillness in Skindeep to evoke a sense of tension, as if the performer was always on the brink of movement. As if the performer had taken the time to think about its own body, and to the indulge in its stillness. When I remember Stuart’s performances, I feel her dancers aim to create a similar tension. They almost freeze in time to admire their own bodies.
Rudi Laermans speaks of the ‘Dansante’ in Meg Stuart’s work. By that he means the desire to move. Stuart aims to question this desire. The dansante in Stuart’s work seems to be referring to an invisible physical impulse that leads her dancers. The notion of ‘desire to’ inspired me greatly. I not only wanted to convey a desire to move, but a desire to stand still. I wanted to hover on the border of both, both desiring to stand still but at the same time desiring to move. Stuart speaks about giving into physical impulses and leaving behind the regulated body and its cultural norms. This is something I aspired to in Skindeep as well. The movements are reactive, they are completely guided by the plaster but also by the energy coursing through the space and the body. They are impulses and far from clear choreography.
In David Claerbout’s book about Meg Stuart, he states that by slowing the movements down they are given a perverse entity. Their meaning ceases to exist and the movements stand alone. This is again something I aimed to reach with Skindeep. Skindeep constantly plays with representation of the body and its pure presence. This is not only interesting for the movements itself, but because this is a naked body. The naked body today still poses a conundrum in the arts as it moves beyond the restrictions of the institution and into the streets. In Skindeep there is a constant interaction between the artistic nude (and its problematic history within art), the naked taboo body (with its cultural connotations), and the body as an ultimate presence. The naked body slows down and creates a collection of images and details of both movements, skin and flesh. It almost becomes a collage that loses its representation and only keeps the presence of the body.
Meg Stuart uses repetition to draw attention to the movement and make the ordinary extraordinary. She inspired me to see movement as an abstract agglomeration of colors and borders, to truly experience every day movement by looking at it again and again. I did not use repetition to convey such an experience. My use of repetition was rather to convey an inability to finish a movement and give a sense of relief when the performer finally managed to finish it. I wanted to create a certain impatience while the performer tries to break free from the plaster.
I will keep going to Meg Stuart’s performances as I am sure her work will keep being a source of inspiration. Even though it is still the very first performance I saw (Violet) that has inspired me the most, her other pieces such as Soft wear and Hunter remain in my mind as well.
Céline Deveux 