Critical Correspondence

Moving Dialogue: THINK FOURTH!

Gina Serbanescu

Thumbnail photo: Cosmin Manolescu

It must be mentioned that even if the exchange in New York ended, Moving Dialogue is an ongoing project. Its continuity will be mostly noted at the level of each partner’s experience in relation with what was received, shared or understood. Looking back now, we can start to evaluate what happened during two weeks of exchange.

Let’s start with the presentations of the artists involved in the exchange! One of the key-events of Moving Dialogue took place at Judson Church (on Monday, 25 October 2010). Two Romanian artists (Mihaela Dancs and Paul Dunca)and two American artists (Jillian Peña and Maggie Bennett) presented one creation each of them.

Lulu’s room, the piece presented by Mihaela Dancs had its premiere last year at the National Dance in Bucharest. Paul Dunca and Maggie Bennett presented works in progress and Jilian Peña showed us a video which is part of a wider project.

Lulu’s Room is a piece that is dealing, at various levels, with the significance of being present. On one hand, we are faced with the presence assumed by the performer, on the other hand we are led to a point where we should deal with the status of our own presence. This two-folded reality of Lulu’s Room stands for a subtle modality of solving out the performer/audience equation.

The video presented by Jillian Peña (Reflection- Tech Rehearsal#1) indroduced us to an universe that seems to be increasingly familiar and important to the artist : a medium where the multiplying of the self becomes a way of self questioning. In this case, the search takes the shape of a dance rehearsal in which sides of the performer’s identity are interacting, overlapping, fading away, melting into one another. These sides are keys to the question regarding the relation between the perfomer’s condition and the importancce of the performing body, between image and thought, between the so-caled real existence and the projection of the self.

Paul Dunca’s piece (Immortality Collapse) broke the established rhythm of the evening with an intervention that made Judson Church sound with laughter. He presented himself in front of the audience as the embodiment of a vampire from Transylvania. Funny, isn’t it? I found it so…to a certain extent. But the laughter can easily turn into a grin when we discover that we have no funny story here, but an investigation of what being a performer means. Under the mask of a funny vampire, Paul Dunca searches for the barrier between the eye of the audience and the nature of the performer. He chooses a legend that is so often turned into a commercial issue in order to analyse the prejudices which surround the core of what being a perfomer means.

Maggie Bennett closed the circle of the “moving interrogations” presented at Judson Church that evening. Her solo (a work progress which is not titled yet) reveals an interesting relation between words, voice and movement, between traditional embodiment in dance and the tendency to break the patterns of movement. Starting from these contrasts she comes forth with an investigation which aims at the presence of the body and at the significances of the gender, whether we regard them historically or hermeneutically.

The four presentations showed us four artistic personalities who designed, with their presence, an interesting puzzle compounded by views on movement, on the nature of the performing body or on the relation between the performer and the audience.