The notion that there is a divide between content and form has been a subject that I have been confronting within my artistic practice for a long period. For a while I aspired to make a theatre without representation by restoring language to the unity of thought, in which thought and sign would be entrained as one in the performers body. But this project demonstrated itself to be impossible to concretize. Since a gesture it is never synchronous with thought, but in deferral. From the point of view of the experience of the performer, I believe that the sensation produced by movement does not represent anything; sensation it is a becoming produced by an encounter of the body with forces. In sensation there is no separation between form and content, ontologically speaking sensation is beyond representation. From the point of view of spectating, yes, representation it is always at work, since it corresponds to the interpretation of the sign, the viewer projects content when he/she witnesses the forms presented by the body.

With my practice, after failing to explore the “modernist” aspiration to break the codes of representation and restore body language to the unity of thought. I start to stage the critique of the “theological” structure of theatrical representation, in which the performers exhibit inscriptions of the desires of a “master” that “transcends” the object of his own creation. This has been articulated in the choreography Against Architecture (2007), in which two performers reveal the friction between their idea of “self” and the roles they undertake as interpreters. These mentioned meta-theatre concerns have been informed by the theatre theories of Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) and the programmatic writings by Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) & Félix Guattari (1930-1992), primarily in their critiques of representation and their alternative ontology. Under the influence of these thinkers, I have aspired to make choreographies that question the essentialist notion of “self” founded on classical concepts of identity, logic and truth; stage dramaturgical devices that could emphasize the split between signifier and sign; and explore the notion of immanence trough a relational practice.  For this last, I grounded in the Deleuzian outside-in conception of the human body as an inscriptive surface that is open to an exterior and inscribed by multiple perceptions that produce intensities that suggests the illusion of depth. Also, inspired in theories of the figural (from his book on Francis Bacon; Bacon Logic of Sensation), I have been attempting to resist representation by liberating the abstract within the figure. By utilizing the concept of “stillness”  “stutter” and “stammer”, I have been occupied in generating a choreographic signature that could resist the modernist “essentialist” perspective that reduces dance solely to the art of the kinaesthetic and kinetic (representing what the dance theoretician André Lepecki after the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk names the “being towards movement”). Being the last how modern dance has been legitimated within the other canonical art disciplines.

By utilizing methods that resemble Berthold Brecht’s (1898–1956) alienation effect and conceptual art’s self-referentiality, I have attempted to rupture theatres 4th wall’s divide between the spectator and the performer, that project the audience into an imaginary space, one distant from the reality of the “presence” of the living body of the performer. Last but not least, based in two types of non-sense: from depth (Antonin Artaud) and surface (Lewis Carrol) I have been questioning the accepted convention that the artist should generate consequent rational discourse that privileges content above form.

Bruno Listopad 2009 ©