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Dear Manuela,
Just trying to communicate my experience of Loom” to you. For me the performance/installation is basically ‘a deconstructive analysis of desire’ (if only this explication didn’t have such a simultaneously pretentious and superficial ring to it). I use ‘desire’ here in the sense of ‘a movement aimed towards an unattainable object, that refuses to let itself be seen, touched or known’. What makes the image so intriguing is the constant sense of loss, of being confronted with something that stubbornly clings to its own secret.
Interesting is the dialogue between the spectator’s desire to possess a total image, and the very impersonal body that is suggested throughout the layers of the fabric. On the one hand, the suggestion of intimacy is very strong. What lies behind the elastic boundary, seems similar to what one might expect to see when unexpectedly getting a glimpse of the goings on in an intimate space, like a house or a private room. In that case the horizontal structure of the fabric can be associated with a venetian blind. Which depending on its being slightly more closed or opened gives a partial view on an intimacy essentially meant not to be shared.
On the other hand, the body shown, is a very impersonal one. The looming shadows seem to be dehumanized to geometrical figures. The promise of the female body in the first part reduced to abstract lines, points and figures/patterns. The female archetype gets unveiled by the fourth dancer who reveals the construction of the feminine ideal. The desire invoked is a desire aimed at an impossible construct. A monster with eight arms and legs, and a head sticking out at hip height.
On a further reading though, the installation format opens up an all too narrow interpretation of the gender context. First of all, the elastic fabric used, makes an interesting comment on the locus of the movement. The movement suggested is not directly related to the bodily movement. It is passed and transformed through the surrounding scenography, and displaced from the body to the movement, texture and format of the dispositive (the boxes). Whereas the original movement is three-dimensional, the perceived is both lengthened out sidewise, prolonged in time (duration) and two-dimensionalised to fit the screen. Hence the references no longer are strictly choreographical, but rather start to refer to the world of the visual arts, where the question around the two dimensions of the painting are questioned by the three-dimensional object, that makes itself be read like a flat surface.
It is a subject that literally weaves itself into the fabric, where it comes across the crosspoint of bodily and material references. I couldn’t help thinking about the woven pictures of Louise Bourgeois, which in her case simultaneously refer to her personal history and the history of abstract painting.
Another association entering my mind, was that of the video image (because of the rippling effect of the fabric), causing a possibly fast forwarded or rewinded image of the body. At that point the image seems to put itself into question, as being possibly just a projection. A present body unmasked as a floating image, both in time and space. It puts the directness of the theatrical image into question, as only at the face of it being unrepeatable.
A last metaphor that came to mind was that of writing. The boxes not only work as projection screens for the all-enveloping desire of the spectator, but also as a blank piece of paper where upon the body writes out its own history. This being (as mentioned above) at the same time an impersonalized history of femininity, a comment on art history, the dialectic between the ‘live’ and the ‘recorded’ (Philip Auslander), and simply a constantly changing set piece, that transforms itself through the imagination of the viewer from the above mentioned venetian blind to the video screen, or the titillating zipper suggestion of the hand movements.
Then, in the second part, I have to admit I got a bit unsure about how I should read the performance. I tried to figure out why the coming out of the boxes should be the necessity that it obviously is to you. I came up with a possible answer which I would like very much for you to contradict or criticize (as you are of course very welcome to do with all the rest as well). Out of my reading of the first part, and hearing some kind of prolonged echo of the sounds made in the fabric boxes, used to accompany the positions in the second part, the suggestion made for me was that the body , as it is eventually shown completely to the desirous gaze of the spectator, in fact still is enclosed/entrapped within a form that cannot ever be trespassed by the perceptor. Just like the fourth dancer reveals the spectator’s image of the performer as a construct of their own imagination, the sound score suggests the impossibility of a complete grasp on the dancer’s body. The performer is only seen as a blank surface, his presence is only skin deep. The skin surface itself being the projection screen, that just had been taken away. The trajectory of the dancer’s poses in that way is as unrevealing, and unsatisfactory to the naïve desire of the gaze, as the foregoing box-experience was.
Some other things I won’t get around to in this text: what with the rhythmical changes of the dance? what will happen when you take out the bodies, like you mentioned in our short conversation? will it make their absence even more tangible? ....
Anyway, in short, loved the work you did on the performance within the months in between the dans@tack-showing and now. and would love to see it again when completely finished..
elke