Eszter Salamon/ Christine De Smedt
Dance #2
performance, italian première
coreography & performance Eszter Salamon & Christine De Smedt
production Le Kwatt, Eszter Salamon & Christine De Smedt

Dance #2 continues Dance #1/Driftworks, the duet that Salamon and De Smedt created in 2008. It focuses on one of the principles explored in the earlier duet: the relationship between movement and voice. Dance #2 attempts to extend potentialities of relation and communication between two performers mixing bodily gestures and words in a new hybrid language. For the performance at Live Arts Week, De Smedt and Salamon will present two of the three parts of Dance #2: listening & mouthing, and words & gestures.

Listening & mouthing is the transformation of language following its phonic aspect. It is a carefully composed speaking by synchronisation, where words (be)come by repetition and modulation. Here, voice and meaning gain a powerful physicality while the bodily choreography is almost reduced to the face.

In words & gestures the two protagonists construct a communication from the spatial distance that separates them. In a gestural language words are literally composed from syllables assigned to various body parts. This game is a language machine where the sound, bodily sign, meaning and sense of hybrid word-gestures challenge each other. Spectators, while watching this ping-pong of ‘question and answer’ become involved in the game they could possibly play themselves. The game could be compared with inventing by learning a language together, which is the poetic by-product of any artistic and love relationship at the same time. The apparently absurd formal invention gets contaminated by some pseudo social political concerns. But the effort to transcend naïve or idiotic statements appears difficult, or just funny.

wednesday 17 april  > 9 pm >  MAMbo