manoeuvre_
2020
CREDITS
Choreographed & Performed:
Candy Karra & Chara Kotsali
Set & Props Design and Construction:
Chrysoula Korovesi, Marios Gabierakis
Lighting Design:
Eliza Alexandropoulou
Soundscape & Music Composition:
Jeph Vanger
Thanks:
Margarita Trikka, Athina Lampadaridi, Nadi Gogoulou, Amalia Kosma, Kostas Konstantinou, Efthimios Moschopoulos, Alekos Bourelias, Dimitris Bourzoukos, Ioanna Paraskevopoulou, Martha Pasakopoulou, Iosif Foskolos
photos: Andreas Simopoulos, mavra gidia
DATES
Onassis New Choreographers Festival 7 , 1-2.2.2020
Akropoditi Dance Festival (Syros), 07th and 8th August 2020 at 19:30 Industrial Museum Kornilakis
Mill of Performing Arts (Larissa), 19 September 2021
A plank of wood and two dancers. Is that all there is to it? Possibly, but obviously not. An absurd situation and yet a well-chosen constraint for exploring the inventive limits of movement, and for studying the dancing body in action.
What is a plank of wood doing in a dance piece? Is it an object, a prop, part of the choreography? How does the malleable materiality of the body interact with the inflexible nature of wood? What, finally, can come from this coupling on stage and what known things can be overturned relating to the production of movement materials and the ways in which we interpret or assign meaning to all that is codified in the language of dance?
This first choreographic collaboration between Candy Carra and Chara Kotsali functions as wordplay: it resists easy interpretations that seek to “reword” each movement or open themselves up to many possible scenarios, all without explaining the obvious, without producing surplus meaning beyond that which is unfolding before our eyes. At the end of the day, these two choreographers seem to be implying that the plank of wood is something for which movement is nothing but an experiment.
Choreographer’s note: “Initiating from Charles Ray’s Plank Piece, Eric Wurm’s One minute sculptures and the reserve of wooden planks in my storage room, the desire to confront our resourcefulness was born. We are two people and a wooden board, or a mixed media trio that attempts many things but accomplishes nothing. The bodies play, carry, lift, support, complement and oppose each other and this is the most important work they produce. The process of work is stripped of the meaning given to it by an ultimate objective and is surrendered to the territory of the absurd. Short-lived moving sculptures that construct and self-contradict themselves on stage and in absentia capture millions of stories of inglorious heroism and proud insignificance.”
REVIEWS
texts written as part of the educational program of Onassis New Choreographers 7 led by Sanjoy Roy.
The usage and transformation of the plank become a fertile ground to conceive the stage as a construction area between object and kinetic creativity, life and lifelessness, joy and stillness. As a spectator, I found myself experiencing a playground for grown-ups, constantly expecting an instant and simultaneously fragile equilibrium.
(Marianna Panourgia)
This playful inventiveness that emerges through the body-object relation keeps us curious about what they will do next. After all, everything stays in a state of lasting instability, as the effort to balance the plank on the wall continues to fail. Throughout “manoeuvre_”, the dual interaction between living body and rigid material remains the active point of interest, putting into question the distinction between “subject” and “object”.
(Anastasia Polychronidou)
Mostly, you watch the moves without being moved by them, but there are glimpses of more poetic significance. Using the plank as a ladder to reach upwards, for example, as if towards some higher purpose. Or the closing scene, the plank repeatedly toppling only for the women to set it upright again – counterbalancing the work’s static, deadpan opening with a Sisyphean image of life, continuing.
(Sanjoy Roy)
