Peeping Tom ‘Diptych’ overview – dance artwork journal

Phrases by Giordana Patumi.

It’s been virtually 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 out a title, with out a outlined id however evidently marked by a historical past – are frequently upset.

5 doorways in a row on a panel at an obtuse angle, within the first piece; cabinet doorways in a lodge room or maybe a ship’s cabin, within the second. What lies between the one and the opposite will not be identified, 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, dwelling fragments of tales whose total imaginative and prescient escapes us: a romantic encounter, a homicide, a son torn from his mom’s arms; insanity, want, worry.

The present opens with a person slumped over a small desk on the precise facet of the stage, on the ground a lady mendacity in a lake of blood will likely 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 way more. A piece constructed on an observational, relational and motion area 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 could possibly 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 legislation of counterbalance obliges them to exist – laborious to say reside – and resist in a hostile dimension through which objects escape, crush with their weight, suck in. A rag escapes the urgency of palms that need to wash away the blood that stains the ground; footwear insurgent in opposition to toes 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 in opposition to management, prevents voluntary gestures, rapes itself, pressured right into a perverse dependence on the identical power that slams, rattles, shakes these cursed doorways. Within the area of an undefined room – a lodge 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 sure, nay, chained; however not by an specific relationship however by being a part of the identical evil and absurd design through which they’re puppets disadvantaged of self-determination and frequently shaken, tossed, dragged, thrown onto the stage by an unknown pressure that has no pity or compassion.

Spatial-temporal nightmares, distortions of actuality, encroachments between the true and the unreal turn out to be 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 modifications within the common 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, all the things has a agency, excessive and extreme tone that opensinterpretative and reflective areas virtually all the time in an ‘out-of-reality’ that seems to be an sincere lens on feelings, on love, on relationships.

Diptych is subsequently a up to date 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, nevertheless it faces them with dynamism, ardour, and vitality, it doesn’t shrink back from them however stands epically as a mannequin.

Love is without doubt one of the work’s paradoxical themes: it’s in the dead of night 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 worry 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, nonetheless, the opportunity of closing and opening doorways, of selecting to behave, at the very least to strive.

How do you get out of this? Like coming back from a journey to a different dimension the place all the things could be regular however will not be. 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 probably the most incisive dance theatre firms on the worldwide scene, creating universes that you just can not cease watching.

Picture credit score: im Dateinamen