my lips (from speaking) (2002)

appurtenant text (cc December 2002)

my lips concerns are language and excess. Plethora and at the same time forced reduction, my lips moves between mimesis and abstraction in continuous series of a-symmetrical, overlapping displacements (666), words (129), simulated nudity, aggression and vulnerability. Speed, exclusions, and precise references to an original but also total absence of originals, sequences without a beginning, middle or end, everything simultaneously and nothing secondary.

my lips segregates the body from ordinary language, and constraints it into limited flat surfaces, limited territories in which dancing is, only allowed to travel between determined points, from one point to the next, from one cluster to the next. Then again, the body knows how to resist its own constraint, by interrupting motion, restraining flow, rearrange texture and contain structure. Methodically and with meticulous precision, the body constructs a network of self-sufficient semantic systems, auto-poetic syntactic structures whereby it gains access to a non-idealized image of self. The dancing body formulates a kind of poetics of necessity, also topography of time, which maps out space not in geometrical/topographical terms, but rather by the employment of a-rhythmical patterns, syntactically, linguistically strictly ordered yet foreign. Series of details, very short curves, corners, angles, accents, apostrophes, question-marks and words, all keep distributing themselves a-synchronically in the body, disregarding spatial fences or normative chronology.

Mimesis as practice of identification, abductive constructions as practice of singularization. With focus firmly directed towards punctuation, the dancer dwells her body and its own surrounding.

This choreography uses cinematic editing methods in order to transform space and imagery into a kind of chrono-photographic (*), artificially constructed live-animation. Built upon double surfaced checkered fabric, my lips forces movement (extension in space) first into geometry and then into fictional timely structures: rhythms and a-rhythms (**). To achieve these two transformations, the piece works with the dancer as a highly specialized technological body/measuring/machine. The choreographed body functions here as the very aesthetics of techné, in the Foucaultian sense of technologies of self, that is, as the materialization of subjectivity and therefore as the ‘speaking’ voice able to enact multiplicity, and hospitality.

my lips works by compression of space by high speed derailing and elongated time on the spot. Perfect system for resistance, invented language for critique and seduction, the work proposes the event of choreography as a social event, and as a satisfying display to be shared, as a kind of celebration, provocative, but very generous.

Other times, my lips overdulge in seriality; 3873 toys, 385 magazines, 16 live-& pre-recorded body-clones and 64 micro-speakers, lined-up ffemales at display, squatting low, moving at shoe level, then rabbits and horses, a lion, alligators, a robin, 37 men, Marylyn Monroe and a giraffe moving about in the zoo of the urban space. Audiences are invited to look at close sight. And then she SEES, enthusiastic tourist as she is, probably unaware of the fact that my lips is forcing her to be an excellent voyeur, a consumer, as well as an obedient inhabitant of public-space. Unsettling, yet optimistically soothing, my lips titillates our common (normative) craving for pleasure, then shuffles you around, promises you the ‘world’, finally refusing to deliver a climatic/succulent peak.

Forced abstraction, queer-speech-act: my lips ‘screams’ violently without speaking out loud, by displaying signs of pleasure and discontent, by embodying the deviated time of feminine scripture. my lips is a critique of body, sight and space consumerism, of misuse of language, of the segregation of the dancing body to the politicized territory of codified entertainment.

my lips is a very private event brought to the public space; an irregular event for measurement and re-definition of both body and architectural/political space; it encourages the regulated body of the dancer, the beholder and the zoological-space of the social environment to walk each other through and SEE as a way of not not SPEAKING.

(*) Chrono-photography, a predecessor of cinematography, was developed with the specific aim to capture and notify movement. It used dance for its experiments and established a new, technological approach to the body and to movement, directly related to dance, which was, at the time, developing into a ‘modern’ form of expression. Today, when cinema has taken over almost entirely the function of dance as theatrical kinesthetic event, dance is showing a new interest in a cinematographic approach to herself, and here, in the piece my lips, dance is forcing her own ‘organic flow’ into a chrono-photographic system of notation, which resists and manipulates chronology.

(**) In the Pythagorean-Platonic tradition, number was known as ‘arythmos’ and, besides being the tool for counting, ‘arythmos’ carried a more elevated meaning as a paradigm of unity in multiplicity. Such an understanding of number, as ‘arythmos’, brought the practice of mathematics close to the practice of ‘logos’, to the deep structure of our experience, the metaphorical articulation of analogies, and dialectical reasoning, similar to the nature of syntax or grammar in language.

PS. The work, such as this text leans upon to the writings of Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray.