Seehund Goldberg Variation II — mit Teppich

testimony by Gabriel Tornabene

We enter a room where tension invades our eyes. A small body facing an open window, stiffened by the effort we can guess, her face is placid. She is about ten metres from the window opening, a rope perfectly parallel to the ground holds her. She is wearing a harness and her hands are firmly gripping the rope.

What is it connected to, what is the performer counterweighting? I walk over to the window and see a rolled up carpet hanging in the air. I didn't know that a carpet could be so heavy as to allow Dorothea Rust to lean backwards at an acute angle to the floor. In this empty industrial room, large square columns give her the idea of walking around them.

She holds the rope, arm outstretched, her bare feet walk along the column, she lies down, her body does not touch the floor. She has the gestures of a mountaineer, manipulates the rope that slides into the carabiners, gives it some weight. She climbs the horizontality of the place. She abandons the column and joins another one, opposite on her right. She struggles not to give in to the load that would pull her into the void.

In this game of balance and symmetry I can't help thinking of a psyche. A reference point that doubles what she does, what she is at the moment of her performance. She makes herself seen. Nothing is to be lost, especially not control. She assumes to be upside down, to risk herself outside of herself, of the necessary convention requiring that if one climbs at right angles it is never to reach the horizon.

She keeps her shoes, but at her side, while keeping the link by a thread, which in some movements, although not having feet with the ground, the shoes guarantee to keep her on the floor. There is nothing providential about balance, it is something to be worked on, something to be sought, never acquired. It would run away at the first negligence. She climbs along the floor towards the window, she pulls the carpet, tucks it in.

The audience is moving, we were following her in the unpredictable stages of her ascent and now she is fixed, is this a relief? Is it a relief? Is she screaming, is it a consolation prize, is she decompensating?

I saw it as a continuation of the stiffening of the atmosphere. The sounds, without being lost, invade the room, they line the walls, permeate every pore in order to continue to scream in silence.

She pulls buckets by a thread, the jerks caused by the pavement make them overflow, she directs them towards the carpet which is unrolled. She fetches sheets of paper from a corner of the room and writes letters on them.

She sticks them on the bucket. A sheet for the S, one for the E, then the A and finally the L. Seal.

A word with multiple meanings, which can at the same time designate enclosure, conservation, hermeticism, mystery. What marks me is the place where this word appears. On the carpet. The absolutely other place, the heterotopia to use a term of Michel Foucault.

A place outside of everything but not utopian, a place that exists in the elsewhere but penetrable. The carpet can be another floor juxtaposed to the paved floor, creating in this play of layers an open booth hosting the imaginary.

Leaving this place she puts on the shoes that have been following her ever since, there are metal reinforcements on the toes and heels. The tap shoes are too big for her.

She scatters the two buckets here and there, and dances, following all the impulses provoked by the unevenness of the room, the position of the spectators, by the taking of a movement and the need to complete it, to give it a form that was unknown to herself. She continues the discovery of the possibility that the place offers.

We felt she was alone, searching for herself, now she is meeting the audience, she could only offer the sincerity of her difficulty to be, to move by too much constraint linked to her need to search for authenticity. She opens herself to the other, she dances while looking at us, inviting a duet if she approaches a person.

Her steps, despite her blue jeans, despite her oversized shoes, are of a certain virtuosity, she lightens up, gets rid of the pressures felt by living differently. She dips her head into a bucket and stands upright, head in the water, feet up.

It was there, she felt the urge to leave the horizontal ascent by diving against gravity, feet offering themselves to the ceiling. She resumes her unchoreographed dance, but in love with the movement, the posture, then stops, suddenly. She leaves.

Her need to experience herself is linked to the simultaneous need to question performance through performance. We are witnessing a research that is developed at the moment it manifests itself, where the thought of the act is renewed following her inspiration, her sensitivity and the perception of herself to which the objective and the subjective, the spontaneous and the mentally visualised preparation communicate in order to finally execute or not.

She lives herself fully and almost unknowingly, managing to surprise and amaze herself and the audience.

published in French on MOMENTUM – Platform for Performance-Art

Gabriel Tornabene

is a writer whose special interests lie in phylosophy, music and the performing arts. He has written poetry that has been published by Frames. He has published short stories in C4 magazine and he also writes plays.

est un écrivain dont les intérêts particuliers sont la phylosophie, la musique et les arts du spectacle. Il a écrit des poèmes qui ont été publiés par Frames. Il a publié des nouvelles dans la revue C4 et il écrit également des pièces de théâtre.

ist ein Schriftsteller, dessen besondere Interessen in der Phylosophie, Musik und den darstellenden Künsten liegen. Er schrieb Gedichte, die bei Frames veröffentlicht wurden. Er hat Kurzgeschichten in der Zeitschrift C4 veröffentlicht und er schreibt auch Theaterstücke.