“Metamotion for 270degrees” loosely departs from the biblical story of Salome. The work approaches the young, dancing female body to touch upon myths around femininity in western art history, in conjunction with christianity and the implemented cancellation of that character. Hovering in and out of those images, the performer enters into dialogue with different objects, times, references and narratives and switches roles, being its facilitator, user, friend, sparring partner. At the same time being its subject, the performer is a labourer continuously constructing architectures of imaginations, made out of the physical and metaphysical aspects in the space. The work tries to understand the necessity of keeping a myth alive while at the same time trying to decompose it, such as the relevance of doing so in front of an audience gaze. During a journey of investigating those matters, the performer is entering realms of sensorial,material, emotional, animalistic, architectural and narrative conjunctions while experiencing its own twisted projections, as well.
The work features references of movement artist and actor Terry Notary ( “planet of the apes” and “the square”) such as performance artist Oleg Kulik, sounds by various artists from the archive freesound.org (listed below), Michelangelo, Rodin, the anamorphic skull in the painting “the ambassadors” by Hans Holbein the younger, such as the entrance sound of “the gate” by Björk, whom she is referring to in an interview as following:
“Also, I used a vinyl album of Venezuelan music I had, [Heku- ra–Yanomamo Shamanism From Southern Venezuela], that was recorded in the ’70s—Venezuelan birds. The birds there sound completely different. They sound like R2-D2, or techno. There’s one beautiful sound that ended up in the beginning of ‘The Gate’, a recording of these birds that Venezuelans believe are the ghosts of fetuses. If they have stillborns or young children that die, they think they go into the jungle and make these sounds.” (Read more at http://www.nme.com/news/music/bjork-recorded-birds- sounded-like-r2-d2-new album-2160172#8a0Gf0mflvwzBesO.99)
Credits:
Choreography and performance: Toni Steffens
Set design: Toni Steffens, Frits van Diehl
Costume: Avoidstreet
Lights and technic: Martin Kaffarnik, Vincent Romijn
Sound edit: Toni Steffens
Featured artists in order of appearance:
Björk (The gate), Jovica aka Jovica Storer (freesound.org) Akumasanti ( Little Dragon Pretty Girl xxx) Leosalom, Pan14, botha9johann, arseniiv, copyc4t, RebekahDay (freesound.org)
Production: Stephanie Luehn, Charlot van der Meer, SNDO Amsterdam
Advice: Mehraneh Atashi, Katerina Bakatsaki
Warm thanks to : Michael Scerbo, Ana Vujanociv, Andrea Zavala, Sigrid Stigsdatter, Michele Rizzo, Renee Copraij, Rodrigo Sobarzo, Stefa Govaart
Reviews:
Robo dog- who are you? A creature, a robot and also a dog. You are a manmade killer, carrying a riffle on your back, ready to kill whoever your master orders you to kill. It hasn’t been long since I came to like robots or dogs. Most of them made me feel indifferent and at worst scared. Now I like dogs, I even consider to get a puppy. When I am trying to find a way to you, Robo dog, there are certain mind perversions, I cannot fully wrap my head around. For instance to see a YouTube video about a robot/ AI engineer who recounts the moment of silence and shock when the “quadruped” was aired on some robotics fair. How the present collective of robot designers and engineers found itself confronted with what remained beyond the limits of their imagination. Do not get me wrong, Robo dog, I do not think you were really that hard to be fathomed into existence. You make perfect sense inside a history of subordination of non human beings and machines, a history of domestication and drill. While it seems perhaps ridiculous, that people who’s primary work is to design instruments to control, interfere with, such as eventually hunt down and annihilate other people have some sort of imaginary, moral boundaries, what was even more haunting for me, was the fact that this calm and collected engineer, remembering the incidence, merely a side occurrence in his perhaps otherwise unbothered existence, started to smile, shyly and almost humbled, a kind of awkward reminiscence of what perhaps once was a feeling of shame. I believe, if you made yourself such a man, shame has systematically been driven out of your realm of experiences. You, the superior, the forth bringer of technological advance, ultimately will bringing the rest of us to light, you do not have to think about the necessary sacrifices of those lives, you lay waste to. Yet, to sit amongst likeminded colleagues and air the imitation of a dog that can carry all kind of technological extensions such as cameras, rifles, sensors and detectors, must somehow made him self aware of something startling, this seemingly gentle man. What did you do, Robo dog? Was it the usage of a part of who you are, a creature often called the best friend of mankind, the most loyal amongst all animal companions and to create a version of it, that, even a dog of flesh and blood is afraid of, as one can see in some tik tok videos. Was it to use those characteristics to join the madness of mankind towards its bizarre and unique desire for violence, its in-saturable wish to see the world and its multi species inhabitants destroyed. And to do so in order to feel perhaps less alone in its perversion, for normalising its thirst for annihilation, since you, Robo dog, both remember, confirm and bring forward this legacy of human domination, that, eventually somewhere deep down, brings a sense of twisted familiarity, friendship and companionship to the battle field. Or is it maybe, how the shape and the very being of our animal companions can remind us of things, even you Robo dog can’t deny, as you effortlessly jumps through the conflict zones? That we cannot shape shift that aspect of your being. That the more we shape shift the violence we breed, the more you will jump and not bark, but shoot at us.