DESCRIPTION
Three women on roller skates play with fictionalised micro-histories, loaded with irony and suspense. They are the daughters of a confused generation, a resistant community, an absurd, overloaded society, where reality is never what it seems. Their bodies act like cyborgs, exploring sexuality, power and freedom, fuelled by a state of constant tension and accumulation. Behaving as modern sorceresses, these three female dancers are stretching the time like an elastic, in sudden stops and flows, allowing themselves to be vulnerable, while sharing memories about their past and fantasies about the future. In “Daughters” there is no present tense, but a perpetual feeling of temporal uncertainty.
CONCEPT
Created in a dreamlike atmosphere, the bodily world in “Daughters” focuses on the idea of urgency or the urge to act. Taking on an experimental approach on roller skating and using the rollers to create a visual effect of a slowly floating body, that moves in two different speeds at the same time, the performance induces a state of tension in the psychic field. Augmented by the dark electronic music of Ukrainian composer Monocube, the movement is inspired by post-punk body rebellion, connecting the head bang, the sick groove and the action of shouting to fragments of memories from the performers childhood.
The idea of a female body that belongs to a generation of mothers and grandmothers, deeply influences our behaviour today and the way we perceive our body. “Daughters” is a type of nostalgic story from the future, created with a very instinctual approach, putting side by side idiosyncratic gestures and powerful postures. Dislocating the action from the gesture, the meaning from the intention and overlapping deeply personal text with random facts from recent history, the performance has a hallucinatory cinematic mood. Following a process of exploring how editing changes the meaning of an action on film, in “Daughters” the dance focuses on frames of movement that seem to be missing, traces of light that follow the trajectory of the body and stage actions that go into a time-lapse.
Enhancing the peculiar characteristic of the movement, the video conceived by German visual artist M. Kardinal through analog technology, deconstructs the shapes, allowing the images to become distorted and blurred, grasping the fragile moment as both a constitutive and generative element of the environment. “Daughters” zooms on the struggle to be heard as an individual in opposition to the idea of belonging. By putting the counter history above the big history, the performance rewires the timelines of past, future and present, through simple and minimal actions.
Ideas as tension and convulsion feed the body as principles of either holding or reacting back to the world. In this regard, space functions as a realm of possibilities, flexible and accessible to the audience and susceptible to disruption. In “Daughters” I am interested to explore the subtle sensation of an intimate proximity, framed in an analog audio and video setting, that can dislocate and enhance the movement. Far from being a pretentious over-intellectual work, the performance is tinted with black humour and irony, in a concert like atmosphere. These three bodies are slowly boiling on stage and when it seems that they will explode, you are faced with the fact that you might have to imagine the blast.
Simona Deaconescu
THE MAKERS
Concept & choreography Simona Deaconescu
Performing & text Georgeta Corca, Simona Dabija, Teodora Velescu
Music Monocube
Visual composition M. Kardinal
Light design Alexandros Raptis, Ionuț Cherana
Production management Laura Trocan
PREMIERE
Oct 2019 @ The National Center for Dance in Bucharest
PRODUCERS & SPONSORS
Produced by Tangaj Collective
Co-produced by The National Center for Dance Bucharest
The project is co-financed by the Administration of the National Cultural Fund. The project does not necessarily represent the position of The Administration of the National Cultural Fund. AFCN is not responsible for the content of the project, nor the manner in which the results of the project can be used. All these are entirely the responsibility of the beneficiary of the grant.
