La morsure (2000)
an interactive choreographic installation
Direction, choreography & conception : Andrea Davidson
Interactive programme : Andrea Davidson, Douglas Edric Stanley & Olivier Koechlin
Generative programme : Andrea Davidson & Olivier Koechlin
Scenario : Andrea Davidson & Douglas Edric Stanley adapted from the poem Le
bûcher où brûle une by Julio Cortazar
Dancers : Toni d'Amelio & Fabrizio Chiodetti
Music : Dominique Besson
Interactive sound programme : Dominique Besson & Olivier Koechlin
Musician : Vascen Solakian (saz, kamentchi, guitar)
Scenography of the installation : Andrea Davidson & Leslie Garcias
Production director : Louis Bourgeois
Coproduction : Centro Petralata, Rome, Le Centre National
de
la Danse, Paris
In promoting a non-linear
approach to narrative and a sensorial way of appreciating images, the installation employs a narrative generator, touch sensitive interactivity
and choreographic gesture as means to tell a story.
Inspired by Julio Cortazar's poem Le bûcher
où brûle une (The Fire on Which She Burns),
the work takes as its theme issues of desire and betrayal in a couple's
relationship and proposes three perspectives onto their story.
Spectators enter a room with two video monitors on opposite
walls that present the man and the woman's account of their
failed relationship.
Shot in a documentary style, the videos
create a certain ambiguity between
the characters' identities as actor-dancers and as real-life persons.
The far wall displays video images of their story that
are being piloted in real-time by spectators in a changing cabin interacting
with a choreographic programme. Entering one side of the cabin, they
access the interactive station that activates a memory bank
of virtual
scenes. Composed of three sections, the programme proposes scenes of
the story as Poloroid shots to be "unfolded" or "tried
out" as one would try on clothes or new identities in a changing room.
Placing one's hand through an opening in the wall, gestures
with a hidden mouse control the quality, speed and direction
of the
dancers' movements on screen.
The dispositive simultaneously proposes an aural interaction:
interactive gesture reveals phrases of spoken text,
music and sounds such as breaths, footsteps, running water or clothes
rustling. Creating a real-time interactive musical score, the cabin becomes
a sort of sound chamber
of rythmic and dramatic expression.
On the other side of
the cabin, the spectator's hand is seen in a plexiglass box. A monitor
underneath displays a book on which lines of Cortazar's poem appear
and disappear with gestures of
the mouse. The interactive poem offers
an alternative means to unravel the couple's story although the spectator on the other side of the cabin, is unaware that his or
her gestures are controlling interactions on both sides of the cabin.
Offering several points of view
onto the choreography, the
work alternately places spectators in the
role of passive witnesses to the couple's story or participants or influencing
the course of the narrative and "responsible" for its outcome.
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