Project by Cuban-Belgian artist Lazara Rosell Albear.
2008. TAGMOSIS at Croxhapox. crox 286. Two-day festival organised by Mahaworks and Ciclic Records. Friday 19 and Saturday 20 December.
crox-box Friday 19
December 2008 TAGMOSIS 2008 by Ciclic and Mahaworks. Eli and Lazara have
started preperations on Tuesday. It's the last project before our winter break,
a short, itinerant festival with performance, dance, muzic and video. A large
stage appeared in the large space, courtesy of the Dienst Feestelijkheden
[Supporting service of the city of Ghent]. Provisions are dropped in by Roger
from Negocito. A fragrance of soup. Juan, a Spannish dancer living in Brussels,
is practicing in the video space. Jan Van Ryckeghem busies himself with testing
the video projection. Eli and Lazara
also take care of the video projection, a work by Alda Snopek. Gabriele works
in the movie industry, she is an assistent producer. Antoine Prawerman treads
through the rooms, snugly wrapped against the cold. He's a musician, Polish
roots, lives in Brussels, plays the bass clarinet. Giovanni Barcella attaches a
white cloth in front of the entry to the cube room. A drum kit sits in the
cube. And a slide projector too. One of the amps has a pile of paper on top
(notes? scores?) and on top of that stash of paper an Italian translation of Dylan
Thomas, POESIE, a 1976 edition by Ed. Guanda, traduit par Roberto Sanesi.
Antoine has settled in the office, making calls. Jan is still fiddling with the
slide projector (...) No way to get the lines right. Has take him more than
half an hour by now. Judith and Bart
drop in, and Younes a bit later, Chris Van der Burght and Alda too. Hurriedly I
count the money in the bar drawer. Meanwhile, Barcella attached a piece of
paper at the entrance of the cube room:
Giovani Barcella
personal solo op
aanvraag
reservatie 3p max
[Giovanni Barcella
personal solo at request
reservations for 3 p
max]
(...) Someone has put
a load of blue fertilizer in one corner of the large room. The blue beads are
arranged like some kind of Halloween mask. A torchlight adds the necessary
atmospherical light. Juan is wearing a black cap and inquires if he can have a
glass of water. Un verre d'eau, in the Ponge version: 'mesure de la capacité
des sobres. Capacité pure, existe à peine.' At the same time a ladies voice is
singing and shouting in the cube room. Monika. Monika stands at the side of a
highway and screams, chants, sings, shouts, vomits. She throws up on the
highway. Later on Eli says in fact he had expected her at crox. She lives in
Berlin. The agreement was for her to do a performance. On the other hand Nan-Ping
is present. She is working with Peter Verhelst these days.
Next to the heap of
fertilizer is an mp3 playing a movie. It is said to be a work by Eli, something
he he made the other day. The evening starts with a solo by Antoine Prawerman
on bass clarinet. Roger is warming the shellfish soup. Somebody asks if we have tea. Tea… do we have
tea. I discover that we have rosebud tea. Prawerman is astonishing. The
instrument sounds as if it has ten inner sides. He explains, later on, that the
improvisation is based on a system of 12 sounds and 13 colours. Whether he lets
himself be guided by the colours he sees around him during the improvisation he
doesn’t tell. But he does say that certain registers of the bass clarinet have
the timbre of a trumpet.
The second action is
a performance by Lazara against a backdrop of video projections. They are Jan’s
movies, a self-portrait to the left, colour improvistions to the right. There
is quite a crowd. One of the visitors is sitting in lotus position.
Giovani Barcella sits
in the cube. Judith orders another glass of wine, Père Guillot, vin du côte de
Nîmes. An improvised kitchen in the corridor to the brainbox space: two plinths
and a plank, a ladle and a black cooking pot. A shelf with chunks of bread, a
stock of plastic spoons and red chequered napkins.
A sharp, spicey soup.
Almejas and shrimp seasoned with coriander. Marc is back from being elsewhere.
In the cube, Barcella has started his first drum solo. A bit later Juan starts
a dance solo. In the other room (…) Eli of Ciclic has put a guitar amplifier
and some other stuff.
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.
The next act is a
duo: Eli on guitar and Nan-Ping dance, percussion, vocals. Michael and Xenia drop
by. Nan at frist crawling, screaming, then rhythmically with wooden blocks on
the floor and at a later stage on sakuhachi, vertically. Eli’s guitar playing
is amazing.
2009. crox 299,
Zennestraat 17, Brussel. Mahaworks, CiclicRecords and TVF art doc cinema each
have their programmes at the ground floor of the building in Zennestraat.
2011. Le Lab nr 3. 7
July. A full evening’s programme with music, video & photography. Marco
Loprieno (IT/EEeb bass tuba, tenor sax, trompet, nagaswaran), Jan Pillaert (EEb
bass tuba), Antoine Prawerman (clarinet, bass clarinet), Audrey Lauro (sax),
Pak Yan Lau (keyboards), Lazara Rosell Albear (drums, pocket trumpet, video).
Projection of photos during the set of Audrey Lauro and Pak Yan Lau. Photos by
Japanese photographers, a.o. Tomoko Imai, Hisashi Murayama and Takeshi Kishi.