There is a taste for the body’s mechanical forces inside Cindy Van Acker’s dance. She works on the synchronicity of beatings, the precision of angles, the evidence of alignments, giving a very authentic attention to parallel lines generated by the head, torso, arms and legs. So the body becomes a semaphore giving very precise signals, involving the perfomer in such a pervaded, focused way, that it indubitably makes sense. Even if the latter remains enigmatic, one can envision some runic alphabet carved in the flesh, some morse code left on stage. Then the slow exactitude of this nearly elusive encryption, induces the pleasure of discovering those lines, pistons, needles, levers, sticks, activated off the regular articulations of the human organism.
Sound and movement yet freeze twice, strikingly, just as a freeze frame, and a woman enters to paint some lines on the dancer’s body. The corporal story stops. A sign is placed dramatically on stage, a sign that bursts of red first, then blue, to finally cancels in black. Dance starts again after the strokes of a large brush have just marked the outline of an arm, a leg, a cheek. Strangely, it is this act of painting that brings the body back to its human reality. This new outfit painted on the skin, quite brutally, completely changes the quality of movement by pulling the choreography towards imperfection, litteraly crossing it out, with drips of colour. The evidence lies in the slobbery coloured stains left on the floor by this choreography of very straight lines. And this is definitely where you find the grace of Helder, this brush dragging an ultra controlled body writing into an uncontrollable range, less mechanical, shifting the identity of the body on stage by a simple operation : some paint lines hastily layered on top of the lines of dance. — MP
