During TAGMOSIS 2008
at Croxhapox. A project by Mahaworks (Lazara Rosell Albear) and CiclicRecords (Eli Van de Vondel).
Experimental dance.
crox-box /fragment/
19 December 2008
Juan strides around,
watches, probes. Macharius church's bells are ringing loudly. Emilie pops in,
right in time to see Juan performing. 'I just managed to forget to put in my
lenses,' she whispers. Juan's body is entirely a dancer's one, pliable from big
toe to left nostril, stiff one moment, next elastic as if made from rubber,
fresh latex leaking from the tree like molten gold, then again wooden, a drop
that slows down and thickens and during that thickening suddenly falls,
disappears, changes into a string that breaks in halves, exploding in sudden
movement - a movement joining all movements, sudden, abrupt, a sequence of
round and square, the trained body in a jumble of geometric figures. The
audience has meanwhile grown to more than 30. More people are arriving. Juan
takes a break. He isn't far from the spot where the picture of Lien, taken in
Genova, had been: the photographer lies on a wall, a wall which turns its back
side to the Mediterranean. Juan is close to the wall. He pants, relaxes, looks,
watches, watches the audience, watches the other dancers, it follows from the
essence of his posture, the watching are transformed into the watched by the
act of watching. Slowly, he bends through his knees. Slowly, slower still,
softly like the bending of a century-old branch. The branch squats, sits down.
even slower movements: centuries lean over one another and end up in the
dancer's body. Then, as he lays down, felled by a blow originating from the
paleolithic... a blow from the infamous Urk Piw from the tribe of
boulder-chewing elephant hunters... Urk Piw, the infamous Urk Piw, inventor of
the blow on the mug... Juan gets up, slowly like a reed rising from old, stiff
mud. Then, even more slowly, he sits, explores, remembers how it is to be
growing. There's no hurry. Soil examination takes time. He stares, watches, a
solid, sculpted staring. He gets up half sitting, almost crawling, a moaning
gesture, slow in all divisions and ramifications of that one movement the body
makes, slow in getting up, ultimate bending steeped in a trembling of hopeless
inertia. He threads to the wooden wall, raises the word FINE. Applause
explodes.