First it is important to point out the great pleasure with which you see, in this piece, two dancers who have worked a lot together those past years, and who know how to share the space and time of a performance until the very little and sensible consistency on micro-moving and infra-timing. Drift is exactly working on this matter: the crossing and blending of two corporalities. And this until the fusion of movements, the confusion of images, until the loss of self, the incorporation into a new transmuted entity.
More than ever, Cindy Van Acker is here going inside the abstraction, into a pure and rigorous geometry, processing with light, space and human body as if they were malleable elements that could be unified. And it is with her very subtle and skilled stage companions Luc Gendroz and Victor Roy that the choreographer succeeds to produce this composite material, made of lines and surfaces, this global matter moving slowly and constantly.
We feel like quoting Tim Ingold in Lines : a brief history, Cindy Van Acker’s recent bedside reading : “For people inhabit a world that consists, in the first place, not of things but of lines. After all, what is a thing, or indeed a person, if not a tying together of the lines – the path of growth and movement – of all the many constituents gathered there ? ”
Lines of the arms, the backs, the legs, extracted from the dark; the surface of the platforms from the scenography on which play the shadow and the light; constructivist geometries, progressive, reprocessing the space over and over again.
If “drift” means in French ‘to let oneself slide’, the word can also mean ardour or urge in Dutch : therefore there is here an interesting tension between the inertia of the drift on one side and the induction of a movement on the other. A paradox that finds its expression in a retained tempo. For the slowness of the elements choreographed by Cindy Van Acker (bodies, cubes, lights) fall under a sort of laissez-faire as well as a patient voluntarism, stubborn, that nothing can stop. Something like the quiet force of continental drift.
But what this abstract dance is generating is essentially a neutralization of the human body as the unequivocal sign on a stage. By juxtaposing some mixed states of the body, sometimes human, sometimes machine like, sometimes animal, by playing with triumphalist postures, neutral or defeatist, the piece cancels every clear link between sign, meaning and identity. To create some kind of strange interregnum, open another space-time continuum, to develop an unlimited perception and give to these bodies soaked in slowness a sort of renewed political force, unknown. — MP
