Peeping Tom ‘Diptych’ evaluation – dance artwork journal

Phrases by Giordana Patumi.

It’s been nearly 4 years since I watched and interviewed Peeping Tom choreographers’ Gabriela Carrizo and Franck Constitution within the event of their American debut with 32 rue Vandenbranden, winner of Britain’s prestigious Olivier Award for Greatest Dance Efficiency 2015.

Quick ahead to January 12, 2023, I used to be in Baden (Switzerland) to look at Peeping Tom’s double invoice Diptych. The present stems from the re-elaboration of cult items from the previous.

The visionary and hallucinatory poetics of Peeping Tom play right here on the evocation of a submerged, a Freudian traumatic repressed, which stays hid however from which the people on stage – with no identify, with no outlined id however evidently marked by a historical past – are regularly upset.

5 doorways in a row on a panel at an obtuse angle, within the first piece; cabinet doorways in a resort room or maybe a ship’s cabin, within the second. What lies between the one and the opposite is just not recognized, however it’s definitely one thing horrendous and unspeakable from which these figures are catapulted onto the scene or are sucked into it with their misplaced, terrified gaze, residing fragments of tales whose general imaginative and prescient escapes us: a romantic encounter, a homicide, a son torn from his mom’s arms; insanity, need, concern.

The present opens with a person slumped over a small desk on the appropriate facet of the stage, on the ground a lady mendacity in a lake of blood can be dragged away, a person washes the ground, whereas a maid dusts a big armchair. A cinematic set design, an amazing and enveloping dance, a piece stuffed with implicit and iconic meanings concerning the transience of human relationships. Peeping Tom’s Diptych is that this and rather more. A piece constructed on an observational, relational and motion house that acts as a ‘metronome’ to a suspended, labyrinthine, and retrospective time. A efficiency of about 55 minutes that immobilises the viewers to the armchair, anchors them to their feelings, amazes them, disorients them, wears them out, terrifies them. Already terror, as a result of the work may very well be positioned, in ‘nerd’ phrases, between fantasy and horror, with clear magical and macabre references paying homage to movies or video games for lovers of the style.

A thriller.

The eight phenomenal performers lend a portentous mastery of gesture – essentially the most imperceptible, just like the shuddering of a breath, in addition to the open and ample contortions of two our bodies dancing an embrace – to the story of those people imprisoned in a hell of Sartrian absurdity, however which additionally evokes the abysmal magma of ache and struggling of Dante’s inferno. Thus, an illogical and merciless regulation of counterbalance obliges them to exist – arduous to say stay – and resist in a hostile dimension wherein objects escape, crush with their weight, suck in. A rag escapes the urgency of arms that need to wash away the blood that stains the ground; footwear insurgent towards ft that need to put them on; suitcases, piles of sheets crush a maid; a mattress hides behind its comfy look a cannibal nature, swallowing our bodies right into a darkish abyss. Even the physique rebels towards management, prevents voluntary gestures, rapes itself, compelled right into a perverse dependence on the identical power that slams, rattles, shakes these cursed doorways. Within the house of an undefined room – a resort hall? of a prepare? – in addition to within the obvious heat of a bed room, the eight figures transfer like damned monads however on the similar time certain, nay, chained; however not by an specific relationship however by being a part of the identical evil and absurd design wherein they’re puppets disadvantaged of self-determination and regularly shaken, tossed, dragged, thrown onto the stage by an unknown drive that has no pity or compassion.

Spatial-temporal nightmares, distortions of actuality, encroachments between the true and the unreal turn into the reflection of the human thoughts, tangled, psychedelic and obscure. First, they’re revealed within the enclosure of a room with a number of doorways, immense and cramped areas, blurry, and macabre lights, then they’re amplified within the cabin of a ship that sails the seas of the human soul, crossing storms, chilly and icy occasions, intimate moments, selections. In between, an ‘open-air’ scene adjustments within the basic hypnosis that leads from The Lacking Door to The Misplaced Room.

It could appear far-fetched to match Diptych to an elegy, but to the viewer this work comes as an intimate, subjective poem, completely detached to a ‘politically right’ transposition of human relationships. Furthermore, every little thing has a agency, excessive and extreme tone that opensinterpretative and reflective areas nearly all the time in an ‘out-of-reality’ that seems to be an trustworthy lens on feelings, on love, on relationships.

Diptych is due to this fact a recent elegy as a result of it proposes ‘relational heroisms’ free from simplistic and concerned readings. It expresses the insecurities and fears that lurk within the blackest and most unbelievable holes within the rooms of our minds, but it surely faces them with dynamism, ardour, and vitality, it doesn’t draw back from them however stands epically as a mannequin.

Love is without doubt one of the work’s paradoxical themes: it’s at midnight care of the blood to be cleaned, within the home windows to be closed, in throwing oneself off the ship’s dock, in going through the monsters within the wardrobe and in each delicate interplay. Diptych expresses the struggling, the anguish, the sense of escapism from actuality, the concern of the on a regular basis, the behavior of the human. On this sense, the gothic, meditative and melancholic tone is a winner: the work is a choral mourning, which brutally mirrors the emotional desolation of our time, providing, nevertheless, the potential of closing and opening doorways, of selecting to behave, at the least to attempt.

How do you get out of this? Like getting back from a journey to a different dimension the place every little thing could be regular however is just not. One other universe that shocks for its rawness and on the similar time hypnotises for its perfection. As soon as once more, the Belgian firm Peeping Tom, affirm itself as some of the incisive dance theatre firms on the worldwide scene, creating universes that you simply can not cease watching.

Picture credit score: im Dateinamen