CaravanePerformance

Noé Soulier, Trajal Harrell, Pol Pi

Performances

24 > 30.10.19

The Dance Center of Columbia College, Stony Island Arts Bank, Museum of Contemporary Art, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee

ECCE (H)OMO
Pol Pi

10.24 / 7:30 > 8:30 pm
The Dance Center of Columbia College

How can a choreographer’s legacy be preserved? In ECCE (H)OMO, Pol Pi reconstructs and transports Afectos Humanos, a work from German choreographer and dancer Dore Hoyer. Originally produced between 1959 and 1962, Afectos Humanosis was composed of five short solos representing five emotions: vanity, desire, hatred, fear and love. Pol Pi recreates the piece for ECCE (H)OMO in collaboration with choreographer Martin Nachbar and translates Hoyer’s gestures into a style of his own. The result is an intensive investigation into what it means when movements are expressed by different bodies, a choreographic language is reinterpreted, and history is reanimated in the present.

 

Mouvement sur mouvement
Noé Soulier

10.25 / 7:30 > 8:30 pm
The Dance Center of Columbia College
10.29 / 7:30 > 9:00 pm
University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee

In Movement on Movement, Noé Soulier analyzes and describes different ways to conceive movements that aim to offer multiple ways to experience the body. By analyzing them, Soulier proposes different ways of focusing one’s attention on a given movement. Words and gestures interact with each other creating correspondences, frictions, and gaps. Using gestures from William Forsythe’s Improvisation Technologies as source material, Soulier investigates the ways in which we talk about movement and the ways in which movement generates discourse.


The Return of la Argentina
Trajal Harrell

10.26 / 6:00 > 7:00 pm
Stony Island Arts Bank
10.30 / 7:30 > 8:30 pm
University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee

With The Return of La Argentina, Trajal Harrell’s work ventures into a new realm of performativity. Drawing upon memory and invention, the performance invites the audience into a fictional archiving of butoh co-founder Kazuo Ohno’s signature work, Admiring La Argentina, as directed by other founder of butoh, Tatsumi Hijikata. Here, Harrell fictitiously remembers, stores, accounts for, forgets, registers, memorializes, ritualizes, and gives home to Ohno’s work-and essentially a new work which seeks to envisage Admiring La Argentina by abstracting with a similar verve to that Ohno and Hijikata gave to La Argentina, the stage name of the famous Spanish dancer, Antonia Merce. Perhaps one could humorously summarize it as: Harrell is voguing Ohno voguing La Argentina and/or Harrell is voguing Hijikata voguing Antonia Merce. It is all at once a departure for Harrell – bringing voguing theory and the archive together with butoh’s life among ghosts. As much for those with no prior knowledge of Ohno’s original work, the viewer’s presence becomes essential as witness and admirer as they too archive into their memories perhaps a new signature work on the imagination and our accountability for what we keep; what we choose to remember and forget; and what we are powerfully left to invent in the here and now.


LOÏE FULLER : Research
Ola Maciejewska

10.27 /  2:15 > 3:45 pm
Museum of Contemporary Art

Ola Maciejewska’s LOIE FULLER: Research considers the agency of objects and actions, and reflects on the relationship between sculptor and sculpture. Human movement sculpts matter into form in this sparse performance based on the works of Loïe Fuller, often regarded to be a precursor to American modern dance.
 

Okidoki
Trajal Harrell

10.27 / 4:00 > 5:00 pm
Museum of Contemporary Art

For Okidoki, Trajal Harrell returns to the groundswell of his first solo, It is Thus From a Strange New Perspective that We Look Back On the Modernist Origins and Watch it Splintering Into Endless Replication (1999). This original work set out the trajectory of what would become Harrell’s groundbreaking signature mark — runway movement as elemental dance and choreography — foregrounding posing, gazing, and walking as a theoretical conversation between American early postmodern dance and voguing. Over the last five years Harrell’s oeuvre began to take shape also through the lens of Japanese butoh dance, which further questioned the role of glamour and virtuosity teased out in Harrell’s initial inquiries. With this new work, Okidoki, the stark minimalism and artistic gesture of the past is refashioned in an uncanny manner that makes the viewer believe the past is being regenerated, however it is Harrell’s craft that renders the aesthetic gaze into a plausible past that never was, resettling into the present with a vengeance.