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La Terrasse | January 20, 2016
For Claude Shannon: The Hidden Phase, Nathalie Yokel
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(translated by William Caroline)
For Claude Shannon: The Hidden Phase
Time is the key factor in the method of Liz Santoro and Pierre Godard, associated artists at Atelier de Paris Carolyn Carlson
For Claude Shannon, the new piece by Liz Santoro and Pierre Godard, benefited from consequential rehearsal time at the Atelier de Paris, time that is as much for experimentation as for creation. While rehearsals were going strong, we discovered the hidden phase of the show which is something of a real commitment, in terms of both the action and temporality of the performance: when the spectators walk into the Atelier de Paris on January 22 and 23 to see the show, will they be aware that the dancers’ situation on the stage had been decided two hours earlier? This is a “learning” phase that is indispensable to the piece’s process because every performance, conceived of as a unique act, is based on a different constraint drawn every evening by chance. Starting with the basic principles of gestural matter constituted in preparation for the show, and with textual matter that provides the source for the sequence to be danced, the dancers have to return to the drawing board. Every night they relearn how to compose with a new hand. In a way, the show constitutes the end of this learning process. The show is the moment when the bodies will have appropriated the new dance and loosened its contours and rhythms in order to enter into the heart of the performance and its relation to the spectator.Precise learning that opens onto multiple questions
What did we discover during rehearsals with our access to this hidden phase of the work? Sitting on the ground with a notebook and pencil in hand, the four dancers wait for the day’s new “key” that will constitute the code for the construction of the new sequence. Pierre Godard then gives them the day’s rule made out of letters, a kind of obscurely delimited combination that puts letters in correspondence with elements that compose a sentence. They carefully write it down: h for determiner, r for adjective, u for noun…before each on their own throws themselves into the scrupulous application of this mysterious constraint in a lexicon of twenty-five arm and leg movements. Tense, extremely concentrated faces. If the vocabulary is simple—dégagés for the legs, arms stretched out ahead and to the side, and the simple use of the space’s planes—the task seems hard. Little by little, the dancers sketch out a choreography that combines the basic gestural elements, the new constraint, and the work’s main principle of applying the syntactic principles of a sentence to the composition of movement. Excerpted from a work by Claude Shannon, the sentence actually occasionally reemerges in the dancers’ mouths as a point of reference and support. Then a rhythm arises. How will they be able to get past all the effort that absorbs them in mental and gestural acuity to inaugurate a new phase—the phase of the show? In what state of body will they offer themselves to the audience, and what will we discover from them behind all the compositional rigor? The answer will be given at the Atelier de Paris this weekend.
