Corps de Paysage — Paysage de Corps

* from the script and participants at the lecture performance, video stills © Dorothea Rust *

notes on the use of the text script during the performance

My scripts always contain much more information than I actually «let drop and let happen» in the performance, they are a reservoir. I memorise a naked text like this one, speak it to myself, think about the action at the same time and create a scenario for it. Moving in action, speaking in the terrain and addressing people and space help to model the text, to open up new contexts. In the live performance I improvise the course of the text; it may be that I start with the last chapter because the situation requires it. To pronounce the text in action in the terrain and to hear how it 'sounds' in the park of the Château Mercier in Sierre is from a different world than the text on paper, just as the park is a different space than the text on a piece of paper. That is the performance! So on the one hand, the performance is both a summary and a fragment, so to speak, of what the text contains, but there are also passages that I expand with comments influenced by my current and situational state. I do 'play' on many levels at the same time; remembering the text, seeing, hearing, taking in what is happening, how I am currently situated in contact with those present and thereby progressing in the scenario of the action.

The text script is 'only' the text, but it is important that it is on paper in that way, even as an excess of information. That's why, for example, the 'exercise' at the end with the audience - everyone has their eyes closed to better perceive the small shifts in the body's balance - is not mentioned in the text. This 'exercise' is part of the terrain shifts and the play with balance that is inherent in dance.

The text in German is peppered with individual terms translated into French in parentheses. It deals with data and contextual descriptions, as well as personal experiences of postmodern dance and its protagonists, who were mainly women. I translated the text ad hoc into French on the spot, so to speak, during the terrain shifts, which was a challenge for me.

text script  ...  performance script

publication

text about the performance in the publication «Paysage son image», edited by Sibylle Omlin