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How can an image ever be understood if it is what calls us to imagine?
(George Didi Huberman ‘Confronting images’)
The project is to project.
In a 3D canvas images perform for (not only) a human gaze that imagines itself as an audience. The materiality of these images shapes, looks out, elaborates and confuses itself until something unfolds in front of our all eyes.
‘Night Flying Project’ can be understood as a staged research where moving bodies try to understand themselves as images, that are both object and subject of a constant observation. Dealing with the condition of being already discovered, they become never trusting, always desiring, longing bodies, the ones that are producing, waiting, waiting and still producing at the same time, as much as they are already produced under the external gaze. Can these images see beyond what we assume to see in them and can they give us a glimpse of what this might be?
We demand the audience to participate: participatory watching, observing, seeing as an activity, a meeting with an individual but also with a material.
Credits
Choreography: Toni Steffens
Performance: Ana van Tendeloo, Timon de Ridder, Pilvi Kuronen
Advice: Michele Rizzo, Ivan Mijacevic
Music: New Order, Depeche Mode, Real life, A-ha
Set desing: Toni Steffens
Light advice: Wout Panis, Martin Kiffarnik
Thanks to: Lisa Skwirblies, Bruno Listopad, SNDO3, Haraldur Prastarson, Igor Dobricic
Photo credit: Nellie de Boer
There are more than 50 subspecies of the Australian jumping spider. Each one of them has their own unique dance routing, performed by the male spider under the judgmental eyes of its female chosen one. The female assesses the dancer and chooses to be either mounted, simply walks away with disinterest, or kills and eats the male dancing lover. At times, she even chooses for a combination of those scenarios. It is assumed that the dancing behaviour is genetically hardwired, rather than “learned”, making the jumping spider a natural born dancer. Certain studies show that female spiders of the jumping spider species Portia however also dance. They do so not in order to seduce their potential mates, but instead mimic the males dancing routine, to protect their nest or wear off other spiders. So while the male spider pursues dancing as a flamboyant act of seduction, with the hope to inseminate the female at the risk of life, the female spider learns, masters and even perfects the males dance routines, using improvisation and trick movements, like unexpected pauses in the routine to ensure her peace of mind, her own life and/or that of her offspring. Wether for war fare or intercourse, dancing comes into play as a decisive moment in a spiders life. A tool, a weapon, a communicator, a trickery and a mastery. While the male spider dancing its courtship dance has been plentiful documented, the female spiders dancing behaviour and how it came to do so is still subject to debate. May it be perhaps, that the female spider is the ultimate dancer in disguise? Is it not her who has the final saying over the life and death performance of her potential lover? And isn’t it though her perfecting the choreographic steps, enabling her to protect her own offspring, that she is elevated into being ultimate judge over wether his hardwired dance that she’s ought to pass on to the following generation, is even worthy enough of her own craftsmanship, and the way how she reverse engineered his dance moves to turn them from a flirt into a fight?
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