P.A.R.T.S. pro toto

(Michiel Vandevelde in Antithesis, the Future of the Image © Clara Hermans)

Michiel Vandevelde and, later, Mette Ingvartsen kick off the new Kaaitheater dance season. In their latest works, they raise serious issues about the dominant visual culture of our time and about the multiple aspects of sexual pleasure.

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s famous P.A.R.T.S. dance school is twenty years old this year. The Kaaitheater is celebrating the occasion with a series of performances by some of the school’s former students, including Michiel Vandevelde and Mette Ingvartsen.

To what extent did that training shape your careers as choreographers or dancers?
Mette Ingvartsen: I think the combination of intensive physical training, the scope for individual creativity, and a focus on theoretical context still pulsates through my work. As well as being trained as a dancer, I was also trained to be a choreographer and to analyse things, which is pretty unique for a dance course. I notice that the older I get, the more interested I become in certain things that already came up during my training, such as dance history, which already featured, to an extent, in my last show, 69 Positions.
Michiel Vandevelde: It had a big impact on me too: I was just eighteen when I started there and the school completely changed the way I see art and performance. It is only quite recently that I have started to become aware of that impact, as initially I was mainly focused on the dance technique side of things. The greatest influence was in the blend of intellectual discourse and dance: that they are not two unconnected entities.

What were the main starting points for your new works?
Ingvartsen: 7 Pleasures picks up where my previous show, 69 Positions, left off. In the last section of that production, I addressed contemporary sexual and social practices: for example, how relations with objects and non-humans are sexualised. Or how desire is not peculiar to human bodies, but is also a feature of vibrations, sounds, molecules, etc. In 7 Pleasures, I am striving for a physical expression of how the sexualisation of our surroundings is happening all the time and helps to shape society. Just look at how we relate to electronic equipment such as laptops or smartphones. That clearly has a sensual aspect, and scientific research also shows that the quality of the image and the screens of those devices constantly arouse desire in our brains. Among other things, 7 Pleasures is about the control mechanisms at the emotional and physical level, which arouse a latent drive towards a kind of pleasure that is largely ready-made.

Why do you explore that with a group of twelve dancers?
Ingvartsen: Our sexuality and physical pleasure are often very stereotyped and limited: lots of people think for the most part, in that context, of intimacy, the one-to-one relationship. But I try to understand how sex and desire, and the role of power in that context, exercise an influence on society. So it’s about the collective, the social phenomenon. What happens if, with a group of people, twelve naked dancers in this case, we prise open the usual patterns of physical interaction? We try to get away from the prescribed ways of experiencing sex. To that end, we have tapped into various forms of imagination. For example to see our bodies as a liquid mass that envelops, inverts, and sexualises space. When you break away from the purely human, as a creature with holes you can penetrate, say, the interaction between bodies changes completely.

Michiel, in Antithesis, the Future of the Image you also focus on particular mechanisms. Specifically, on how manipulated images determine the way we see the world.
Vandevelde: True. The trigger was a controversial ad for Levi’s jeans, which used images of protest marches. It was controversial because Levi’s misused material from the public sphere for purely economic purposes and thereby made the power of the collective harmless. That started me thinking about the correlation between technology, ideology, and visual culture today. How do images work, what role plays technology in that context, what is the relationship between image and text, and, especially, which images dominate our public domain today? And the domain of dance too. That’s how I came up with the dance material for the show: movements out of videos such as those for “Gangnam Style” or Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies”, which have been seen by so many people. Via the technique of reappropriation, I have tried to reclaim those images.

(7 Pleasures © Marc Coudrais)

How does that work?
Vandevelde: During the performance, I apply a variety of compositional techniques to that material from the public sphere, including acceleration, slowing down, enlargement, etc. In that way, I actually exhaust it, and the idea is that gradually a different sort of visual culture emerges. Today, we have hardly any means of taking action against the images that dominate wherever you look, but maybe the theatre is one of the few places where we can reappropriate things from the public sphere and present an antithesis.

You dance solo and, by chance or not, naked too, like the dancers in Mette’s show.
Vandevelde: It’s not by chance, as pornification is, of course, strongly present in the dominant visual culture that I took as my starting point. That is not necessarily something I want to combat, but I wanted, starting from those sexually charged images, to go in search of the fine points of nakedness. Another reason is that there exists a whole history of the representation of the naked body. I wanted to refer to the culture of antiquity and to visual cultures from previous centuries. That way, I place our own visual culture in a kind of historical perspective.

Antithesis, the future of the image 17 & 18/9, 20.30
7 pleasures 2 & 3/10, 20.30
Kaaitheater, www.kaaitheater.be

Photo © Saskia Vanderstichele