Schauet doch
Contextual note
This text was first published in the magazine Etcetera in Dutch. This is the English version of the original text
Schauet doch. Do look. What does Alexander Baervoets want us to look at? What does he want to show us, what does he want to make us see? After all, the stage is empty apart from a sound installation and a few big carpets, lying at right angles to each other and overlapping, forming a diagonal from upstage right to downstage left. This is how the performance opens: the stage remains empty for several minutes with no human presence. It also ends with the stage empty for several minutes without dancers. Between the two is an occurrence, an unrepeatable, transient, temporary conglomerate of movements, an event that cannot be recaptured, not by the four dancers, nor by ourselves, the audience; a painful, tragic experience of the passing of time, irreversible, a question of being and time, of our being in time. Baervoets wishes above all to show us a structure, wants to let us experience this succession of movements in space and time as a composition, a work of art with a compelling internal logic. He wants to show us his choreography of movements almost naked and rudimentary – movement rather than dance, because complicated seductive virtuoso dance would divert the attention too much from his goal – so that our viewing would not be distracted by superfluous theatricality and would be given the space the necessary to turn to itself in a mental duplication of what takes place here and now on stage.
As the performance advances, or in other words as time passes, we increasingly realise there is something fateful in our looking, a tragic limitation, the impossibility of grasping the images here and now, the impossibility of penetrating into this membrane of movements, being increasingly thrown back onto the limitations of our recollections, our failing memory, fragments of images and memories that almost immediately infect and overwrite what we see and experience. It becomes increasingly clear that for Baervoets the movements are a means, a medium in which to examine and shape the notion of duration and the perception of duration, while at the same time, as the performance unfolds, an underlying emotionality, a hidden meaning, unintentionally develops, one to which we feel we shall never have access.
As in earlier creations, Baervoets has left plenty of space for improvisation in his composition, his choreography, but one nevertheless senses that the main structure and the various stages and patterns are quite rigid and strict. Everything takes place along, over and via a single imaginary diagonal line from upstage right to downstage left. The dancers enter the stage one by one at irregular though quite long intervals and each in their own idiom of movement follows a similar walking route from right to left. Initially, the slowness and repetition with which this is done provokes a certain resistance, but the disorientation of our perception of duration and the experience of time also takes shape in this resistance, and you feel that your watching these repetitively moving bodies forces you to look at your own looking. In other words, what is happening on stage takes you to a mental zone where the looking can settle down and free itself from the exact passage of time on stage. It is also impossible, afterwards, to say precisely how long the performance actually took. The four dancers themselves occasionally introduce caesurae into this continuous, irregular flow by making adjustments to the sound installation or playing the overpowering sound of a foghorn. This caesura briefly stops all movement and drags the four performers out of their continuum, their perpetuum mobile, for a moment.
These moments are very expressive, almost expressionist, and the more they are repeated, the more they seem gradually to bring an emotionality into the performance, and to herald an inevitability. To the spectator too, they increasingly come as blows from a sledgehammer, or as possible fault lines.
As time passes, the tempo at which the four dancers cover their diagonal line slowly evolves; they vary this straight line, not only by sometimes stepping backwards a little and then forwards again, but synchronous movements also gradually arise between two or more dancers, and movements are also made perpendicular to the diagonal line which gives rise to zigzag forward strides. The rectangular shape of the carpets, and their outline, is eagerly used to mould miscellaneous variations on the original concept of the diagonal, variations which at the same time adjust and disrupt the diagonal as a constitutive principle. While there is little contact or eye contact throughout the entire performance, occasionally, almost purely by chance, intense though serene moments of touch and complicity do also arise. But for the time being these chance contacts are swallowed up by the increasingly intense continuous flow of movements from right to left, from back to front. In this continuous repetitive process of striding forward along the diagonal, cracks appear not only as a result of the sudden call of the foghorn, but the more the tempo of movement, energy and level of sound on the mixed tape are increased, the more frequently moments and places outside the ‘membrane’ of the diagonal imperative of the choreography arise, in which there is space for improvisation, separate from the collective lines and figures, and the arranged composition and structure of movements. At the moments when the individuality of each dancer, with its particular range of movements and improvisation, is briefly expressed in a postmodern language of movement, often highly dance-like and fluent, and where the dancer escapes for a moment the structural rules, it becomes that much more pregnantly clear that we are looking at an abstract fabric (carpet) of lines and figures, a chart of positions and shifts of moving bodies, a chess-game of movement in time and space. Even when, towards the end of the performance, the dancers come towards the front of the stage, almost to the edge, as if they wanted to come close to us and break through the fourth wall, it becomes even clearer that Baervoets is directing our looking, our viewing, at an experience of duration by way of movements, patterns and structures in space and time.
Now, Baervoets knows and realises very well, impassioned and erudite connoisseur of dance history and practice as he is (as well as being an ingenious builder of concepts and structures), that this process of repetitive movement along a diagonal axis, modulated from silent too loud, from slow to fast, from monotonous to varied and differentiated, can never end in its own predictable emotional climax, if it is his wish to reveal to us what interests him as a choreographer and what he wants to show us and let penetrate our perception. This is why, about halfway through the performance (it may be three-quarters, because our experience of time is gradually so disoriented that you can hardly say at exactly what point something happened), an inversion occurs after the point at which, after another blast from the foghorn that pierces to the marrow, all four dancers for the first time come together in a geometrical arrangement without physically touching each other, in the middle of the stage halfway along the diagonal. From then on the speed of movement is increased even more, the ‘music’ gets even louder, but at the same time one of the dancers, David Hernandez, after taking yet another new walking route, increasingly undermines this structure, this pattern, by taking off his clothes one by one. Hernandez becomes more and more naked (first the long trousers, then the T-shirt) and in this way is increasingly disruptive to Baervoets’ structure, while at the same time making it clear to us that what we were watching was choreography, a composition of movement in time and space. Hernandez’ naked body breaks down Baervoets’ structure with its highly physical presence of muscles, sinews and carnality, a position which Hernandez reinforces even more in a moment of improvisation outside the diagonal, when his body almost displays itself like that of a bodybuilder, making us aware of his body as a machine made of muscles, sinews and joints. Nor is there any other possibility than that, at the moment Hernandez takes off his underpants and is completely naked, his function as an element or pawn in the choreography must cease.
Symbolically, Hernandez must die. In the context of this structure, the dancer becomes a dead, supine body, almost obscene in the setting of events on stage, and must therefore be covered up. But in covering Hernandez’ naked body with a rug and in the dragging of these rugs, the structure of movement, the membrane, is again, and now much more fundamentally, broken down because these rugs, in addition to the diagonal they form, were also the patterns of variation in the composition as a floor-plan. In this act, Baervoets resolutely rolls up his own construction in a single movement and shows the previous route as no more than an imaginary construction of lines and movements that could only exist because we, the audience, duplicated it by a mental act into a work of art or composition. Brice Leroux, who covered Hernandez with the rug, drags the covered body out of the diagonal to the middle of the forestage, thereby destroying entirely the whole basic structure – almost as the symbolic remnant of the exploded construction – and leaves the stage. When Alexander Baervoets, in an attempt to dissolve into the twilight zone between stage and audience, has traversed this real but also imaginary dividing line from left to right with proverbial slowness and extreme awareness of duration, he too can do nothing other than cover himself with a rug when he returns to the stage. For a short while everything is buried under rugs.
It is at this moment that the feeling creeps up on you that you are watching your own death, your own process of dying, to which no one can ever have any access, and which will always remain aporetic for each one of us. In Baervoets’ and Hernandez’ going off-stage and/or becoming obscene, you experience the figurativeness and thus the inaccessibility of your own death. Something of this becomes tangible in Baervoets’ and Hernandez’ ‘dying off’, and this something touches on the essence of your ‘being’. Just as the dancers in their membrane have no access to the meaning of what is happening because they are imprisoned in this membrane and cannot break through the fourth wall, that twilight zone, however far they come down stage and however easily they could step into the auditorium, so we are sitting in the membrane that this world forms for us and we have just as little access to any understanding of a deeper hidden meaning, if such a meaning is there in the first place. Baervoets crawls out from under the rug, takes away the rug covering Hernandez and before he goes offstage neatly lays Hernandez’ garments next to him one by one. Hernandez can now be reborn in the garments he puts on one by one before leaving the stage. But do look. Schauet doch. This is what the fourth dancer seems to want to say – Katrien van Aerschot, who came on first – in her still crouching position upstage right, which she had taken up when the performance changed to rolling up the rugs. She has been out of the action ever since this turning point and in the end we almost forgot her, but now she is left there alone as if frozen, looking and in a still pose, her presence becomes so much more tragic and pregnant. Because together with us, but then from the other side, she has looked from the other side at this irrevocable, never to be recaptured, unrepeatable occurrence, on the stage but also off, as an insider yet also an outsider, and indirectly makes us aware of the fact that she probably saw a different occurrence to us and that we shall never be able to repeat our watching from her point of view. Schauet doch at the tragedy of our viewing, which always falls short or comes too late and clutches at recognition or lapses back into the distillation of structures and lines, of patterns which may or may not repeat themselves and in fact are only recognisable in their repetition. Because, when Katrien van Aerschot finally leaves the stage, the last to do so, and the stage is once again empty, at the same time the last to leave behind a great void, and Schauet doch und sehet ob irgend ein Schmerz sei, the start of Bach’s Cantata no. 46, resounds from the depths of the stage, first quietly then louder, the mental space of the music, with its polyphonic fabric of voices and its dynamic composition from quiet to loud, from simple threads to complex texture, opens the inner space to a consideration of what we saw, of what we witnessed. The movement event just finished reveals itself even more as an ingenious construction with an internal logic, as a composition whose every layer is cyclical in form.
You can in fact see Bach’s music as an epilogue in which Baervoets is able, through the music and the fabric of voices, to let us consider the looking we have just done, as if Bach’s composition, which is much shorter than the performance, can better enable us to fathom Baervoets’ composition, because of its compression and yet at the same time its similar structure and composition. So in fact Baervoets duplicates his work in Bach’s music and tells us that we should interpret it too as a composition of structures, lines and voices. In fact in the end, in our mental duplication, the dancers’ movements become voices and music, while in retrospect Bach’s composition becomes movement and image. At the same time, this duplication means our watching and listening also becomes tragically irrevocable, impossible to recapture. This epilogue exposes this consideration of our limited viewing and lets us feel that we shall never have access to the blind spot of our emotionally charged perception. That as beings who live in time and do not exist without the combination of time and space, we can never gain access to this core of our being and consciousness. And letting us experience this in such a tragic way by means of a composition of movement. This is great art.
As the performance advances, or in other words as time passes, we increasingly realise there is something fateful in our looking, a tragic limitation, the impossibility of grasping the images here and now, the impossibility of penetrating into this membrane of movements, being increasingly thrown back onto the limitations of our recollections, our failing memory, fragments of images and memories that almost immediately infect and overwrite what we see and experience. It becomes increasingly clear that for Baervoets the movements are a means, a medium in which to examine and shape the notion of duration and the perception of duration, while at the same time, as the performance unfolds, an underlying emotionality, a hidden meaning, unintentionally develops, one to which we feel we shall never have access.
As in earlier creations, Baervoets has left plenty of space for improvisation in his composition, his choreography, but one nevertheless senses that the main structure and the various stages and patterns are quite rigid and strict. Everything takes place along, over and via a single imaginary diagonal line from upstage right to downstage left. The dancers enter the stage one by one at irregular though quite long intervals and each in their own idiom of movement follows a similar walking route from right to left. Initially, the slowness and repetition with which this is done provokes a certain resistance, but the disorientation of our perception of duration and the experience of time also takes shape in this resistance, and you feel that your watching these repetitively moving bodies forces you to look at your own looking. In other words, what is happening on stage takes you to a mental zone where the looking can settle down and free itself from the exact passage of time on stage. It is also impossible, afterwards, to say precisely how long the performance actually took. The four dancers themselves occasionally introduce caesurae into this continuous, irregular flow by making adjustments to the sound installation or playing the overpowering sound of a foghorn. This caesura briefly stops all movement and drags the four performers out of their continuum, their perpetuum mobile, for a moment.
These moments are very expressive, almost expressionist, and the more they are repeated, the more they seem gradually to bring an emotionality into the performance, and to herald an inevitability. To the spectator too, they increasingly come as blows from a sledgehammer, or as possible fault lines.
As time passes, the tempo at which the four dancers cover their diagonal line slowly evolves; they vary this straight line, not only by sometimes stepping backwards a little and then forwards again, but synchronous movements also gradually arise between two or more dancers, and movements are also made perpendicular to the diagonal line which gives rise to zigzag forward strides. The rectangular shape of the carpets, and their outline, is eagerly used to mould miscellaneous variations on the original concept of the diagonal, variations which at the same time adjust and disrupt the diagonal as a constitutive principle. While there is little contact or eye contact throughout the entire performance, occasionally, almost purely by chance, intense though serene moments of touch and complicity do also arise. But for the time being these chance contacts are swallowed up by the increasingly intense continuous flow of movements from right to left, from back to front. In this continuous repetitive process of striding forward along the diagonal, cracks appear not only as a result of the sudden call of the foghorn, but the more the tempo of movement, energy and level of sound on the mixed tape are increased, the more frequently moments and places outside the ‘membrane’ of the diagonal imperative of the choreography arise, in which there is space for improvisation, separate from the collective lines and figures, and the arranged composition and structure of movements. At the moments when the individuality of each dancer, with its particular range of movements and improvisation, is briefly expressed in a postmodern language of movement, often highly dance-like and fluent, and where the dancer escapes for a moment the structural rules, it becomes that much more pregnantly clear that we are looking at an abstract fabric (carpet) of lines and figures, a chart of positions and shifts of moving bodies, a chess-game of movement in time and space. Even when, towards the end of the performance, the dancers come towards the front of the stage, almost to the edge, as if they wanted to come close to us and break through the fourth wall, it becomes even clearer that Baervoets is directing our looking, our viewing, at an experience of duration by way of movements, patterns and structures in space and time.
Now, Baervoets knows and realises very well, impassioned and erudite connoisseur of dance history and practice as he is (as well as being an ingenious builder of concepts and structures), that this process of repetitive movement along a diagonal axis, modulated from silent too loud, from slow to fast, from monotonous to varied and differentiated, can never end in its own predictable emotional climax, if it is his wish to reveal to us what interests him as a choreographer and what he wants to show us and let penetrate our perception. This is why, about halfway through the performance (it may be three-quarters, because our experience of time is gradually so disoriented that you can hardly say at exactly what point something happened), an inversion occurs after the point at which, after another blast from the foghorn that pierces to the marrow, all four dancers for the first time come together in a geometrical arrangement without physically touching each other, in the middle of the stage halfway along the diagonal. From then on the speed of movement is increased even more, the ‘music’ gets even louder, but at the same time one of the dancers, David Hernandez, after taking yet another new walking route, increasingly undermines this structure, this pattern, by taking off his clothes one by one. Hernandez becomes more and more naked (first the long trousers, then the T-shirt) and in this way is increasingly disruptive to Baervoets’ structure, while at the same time making it clear to us that what we were watching was choreography, a composition of movement in time and space. Hernandez’ naked body breaks down Baervoets’ structure with its highly physical presence of muscles, sinews and carnality, a position which Hernandez reinforces even more in a moment of improvisation outside the diagonal, when his body almost displays itself like that of a bodybuilder, making us aware of his body as a machine made of muscles, sinews and joints. Nor is there any other possibility than that, at the moment Hernandez takes off his underpants and is completely naked, his function as an element or pawn in the choreography must cease.
Symbolically, Hernandez must die. In the context of this structure, the dancer becomes a dead, supine body, almost obscene in the setting of events on stage, and must therefore be covered up. But in covering Hernandez’ naked body with a rug and in the dragging of these rugs, the structure of movement, the membrane, is again, and now much more fundamentally, broken down because these rugs, in addition to the diagonal they form, were also the patterns of variation in the composition as a floor-plan. In this act, Baervoets resolutely rolls up his own construction in a single movement and shows the previous route as no more than an imaginary construction of lines and movements that could only exist because we, the audience, duplicated it by a mental act into a work of art or composition. Brice Leroux, who covered Hernandez with the rug, drags the covered body out of the diagonal to the middle of the forestage, thereby destroying entirely the whole basic structure – almost as the symbolic remnant of the exploded construction – and leaves the stage. When Alexander Baervoets, in an attempt to dissolve into the twilight zone between stage and audience, has traversed this real but also imaginary dividing line from left to right with proverbial slowness and extreme awareness of duration, he too can do nothing other than cover himself with a rug when he returns to the stage. For a short while everything is buried under rugs.
It is at this moment that the feeling creeps up on you that you are watching your own death, your own process of dying, to which no one can ever have any access, and which will always remain aporetic for each one of us. In Baervoets’ and Hernandez’ going off-stage and/or becoming obscene, you experience the figurativeness and thus the inaccessibility of your own death. Something of this becomes tangible in Baervoets’ and Hernandez’ ‘dying off’, and this something touches on the essence of your ‘being’. Just as the dancers in their membrane have no access to the meaning of what is happening because they are imprisoned in this membrane and cannot break through the fourth wall, that twilight zone, however far they come down stage and however easily they could step into the auditorium, so we are sitting in the membrane that this world forms for us and we have just as little access to any understanding of a deeper hidden meaning, if such a meaning is there in the first place. Baervoets crawls out from under the rug, takes away the rug covering Hernandez and before he goes offstage neatly lays Hernandez’ garments next to him one by one. Hernandez can now be reborn in the garments he puts on one by one before leaving the stage. But do look. Schauet doch. This is what the fourth dancer seems to want to say – Katrien van Aerschot, who came on first – in her still crouching position upstage right, which she had taken up when the performance changed to rolling up the rugs. She has been out of the action ever since this turning point and in the end we almost forgot her, but now she is left there alone as if frozen, looking and in a still pose, her presence becomes so much more tragic and pregnant. Because together with us, but then from the other side, she has looked from the other side at this irrevocable, never to be recaptured, unrepeatable occurrence, on the stage but also off, as an insider yet also an outsider, and indirectly makes us aware of the fact that she probably saw a different occurrence to us and that we shall never be able to repeat our watching from her point of view. Schauet doch at the tragedy of our viewing, which always falls short or comes too late and clutches at recognition or lapses back into the distillation of structures and lines, of patterns which may or may not repeat themselves and in fact are only recognisable in their repetition. Because, when Katrien van Aerschot finally leaves the stage, the last to do so, and the stage is once again empty, at the same time the last to leave behind a great void, and Schauet doch und sehet ob irgend ein Schmerz sei, the start of Bach’s Cantata no. 46, resounds from the depths of the stage, first quietly then louder, the mental space of the music, with its polyphonic fabric of voices and its dynamic composition from quiet to loud, from simple threads to complex texture, opens the inner space to a consideration of what we saw, of what we witnessed. The movement event just finished reveals itself even more as an ingenious construction with an internal logic, as a composition whose every layer is cyclical in form.
You can in fact see Bach’s music as an epilogue in which Baervoets is able, through the music and the fabric of voices, to let us consider the looking we have just done, as if Bach’s composition, which is much shorter than the performance, can better enable us to fathom Baervoets’ composition, because of its compression and yet at the same time its similar structure and composition. So in fact Baervoets duplicates his work in Bach’s music and tells us that we should interpret it too as a composition of structures, lines and voices. In fact in the end, in our mental duplication, the dancers’ movements become voices and music, while in retrospect Bach’s composition becomes movement and image. At the same time, this duplication means our watching and listening also becomes tragically irrevocable, impossible to recapture. This epilogue exposes this consideration of our limited viewing and lets us feel that we shall never have access to the blind spot of our emotionally charged perception. That as beings who live in time and do not exist without the combination of time and space, we can never gain access to this core of our being and consciousness. And letting us experience this in such a tragic way by means of a composition of movement. This is great art.