Bluff
Three performers appear one after another in a rudimentary setting of an almost empty stage, a black box marked with a small square where the action takes place. An exchange of gestures that at first might seem personal, then again conventional, repeatable, worn, almost ironical. Would it be a lesson in bluffing?
What constitutes the identity of contemporary body and what is at stake here? Stretched between the expression that belongs to someone else and the embodied experience of self-perception, the body steps out of the territory defined by these two opposing modes. The body keeps transcending its own fixed condition and continues
to change, moving towards new forms and attitudes.
Drawing from the potential of illusion and mirroring, the performance involves familiar gestures and actions that in their use of repetition, accumulation and systematic but small alterations remind
of magic tricks. The effects seem to appear almost imperceptibly and
defy what the viewers might anticipate. Isolating and transferring specific gestures from sequence to sequence during the performance enables a build-up of a short-lived vocabulary that can be exchanged and
modified between the performers. Shifts and repetitions have an almost hypnotic effect on viewers, producing a feeling of detachment and instantaneous moments of loss of attention. Bluff plays on subconscious gaps in perception that get completed by perception habits grounded
in various individual social and cultural backgrounds of the members of the audience.
Bluff is a way of showing how contemporary body becomes what it is. Does the body strive to be something else, something
more than what it learned to be? The setup of this experiment involves three individuals, each of whom has exercised and mastered a specific body language. Individual gestures and types of movement will be deconstructed, passed from one person to another and further. Bluff will culminate in one dance solo, built on sequences of movements brought together by three different performers. This solo will try to give an
embodied answer to the question: is there a dance that explains itself?
video excerpt «bluff»