The point at which it last made sense

Over the weekend I was in London trying to write promo for our new duet. Robin says how it is also about the primal nature of beauty! 

..yes I like to write poems too.

 

The point at which it last made sense

Concept and Choreography: Nick Bryson, Robin Dingemans

Performance: James O’Shea, Rosa Vreeling

“I feel you living in a cloud that is dissipating

I feel your cruise control switching off.

Flocking to the closing doors

And waiting for them to open

Is some kind of closure for you?”

-Nick Bryson

What if the advertising agencies are correct and we all do have an endless capacity to ingest product placements and subliminal references to beauty products and ingenious uses for cotton buds and handy wipes? By agreeing to abide by this form of capitalism in its worst inane spiritual vacuum,  “The point at which it last made sense” attempts to fast track us through and hurl us out the other side.  In doing so, the work picks up the current trends in art trying to highlight contradictions in how we all live in our consumerised world, when It is clear that our current recession is a mere shower, a precursor and understudy to the worst of the rain.

The dance work infiltrates and grapples with our image culture, giving the viewing public an overdose of a post joyful, post intimate, post ironic world. Through a series of hypotheses and extraordinarily arresting images and startling poses of a beautiful young couple, we are dropped slap -bang in the middle of our commercialised maelstrom. This is a place where we have utterly dispensed with the pain of confronting ourselves and replaced it with an anaesthetised numbness. …Even in the face of the impending downfall of our economic stability.

This is a highly self-conscious step, deliberately positioning the dance work on the upslope in our orgy of gadget-ed connectivity. “The point at which it last made sense” drives us up and over and onto the down slope, where we might unambiguously seek tranquillity, a restored resting place of love and natural perception.

What is on the other side of the constant psychobabble, the other side of irony, in an overly surveillance-ed world, is a place of uncertainty, but a place where we must not fear to tread.

And so “The point at which it last made sense” carries the dance mantle of the Dark Mountain Project and ‘uncivilised dance’, where an apocalyptic perfume commercial has lost its footing at last. Casting an English wheelchair-abled James O’Shea alongside Dutch Rosa Vreeling, the message is “Do not even think of getting a mortgage” in this day and age “plan, recruit, train, educate, provide support. …and rest.” By deliberately portraying a beautiful man and woman who cannot function without each other, the dance piece catapults us beyond our enfeebled and soporific globalisation, espousing connectivity and community to a found and shared future.

A Thought from The Film Dolls

Legitimate Bodies Dance Company is a dance company in the Irish Midlands, what sort of a dance company is up to me and us (Nick Bryson and Cristina Goletti) to decide. I am very attached to routine, you might think that that tells you nothing but actually it tells you everything. I wonder if it is possible to run a publicly funded arts organisation with no fear of rejection. That is my hypothesis for 2012. I want to write about the proximity to depression a kind of cyclical rhythm in the mood and that this is part of the routine I am talking about. This is with expressed aim of not hiding anything. I do not know why other people and more specifically artists post anything on a blog but I can say I do it because it is better than doing nothing. From what I am writing you can tell I am watching a Japanese film...which is true. It is called 'Dolls'. We do not hide these feelings and end up with a sort of 'uncivilised art' (Dark Mountain Project) where we enter deeply enter into the mood we are in. Just fight like crazy, until we are not fighting like crazy and everything flows again in the mind and body. It is like a little bridge to when we are hungry again for our dinner and we might want to write explanations of the benefit of contemporary dance again to the general public. So the best I can do is a kind of active viewing of films, like a kind of a bridge in the cycle of moods.

You catch me as a new convert to blogging. It is absolutely key that such reads as a stream of consciousness. I am dance artist in residence in Birr, County Offaly. What on earth does that mean? It is a bog standard residency in Ireland. Don’t worry I am just being provocative. Anyway a couple of weeks ago I was travelling across from Holland to Germany in a train. It is a strange dichotomy as usual or not as usual. I am an artist who needs to return and explore and think, it is not a luxury. I am not embittered, no it is just that I cannot be the whole of the machine. That is how I described it to other contemporary dance practitioners in the Midlands.