(working title) By Guillaume Marie, Igor Dobricic & KK Null Conception, Choreography: Guillaume Marie Conception, Dramaturgy: Igor Dobricic Original Soundtrack: Kazuyuki Kishino aka KK Null Created in collaboration with and performed by: Els Deceukelier, Guillaume Marie, Roger Sala Reyner & Suet Wan Tsang. Costume: Cédrick Debeuf Stage Design: Etienne Bideau-Rey Make-up, FX effects: Rebecca Florès Light Design: Abigail Fowler Technical Director: Stéphane Monteiro Graphic Designer: Grégoire Gitton Traductor: Stéphanie Memeteau-Gitton Production & Booking: Guillaume Bordier [email protected] / +33(0)6 64 81 07 98 Production: Tazcorp/ Co-Productions: Ville de Strasbourg (confirmed), Emmetrop (confirmed), CCN Roubaix/Ballet du Nord - accueil studio (confirmed), Centre national de la danse - résidence augmentée (confirmed), Le Générateur (Gentilly) - Accueil en résidence / dispositif DRAC IdF (tbc). La Ménagerie de Verre (Paris) (tbc), etc. For some years now, Guillaume Marie - a French dancer and choreographer, Igor Dobricic - a Serbian dramaturge and philosopher and Kazuyuki Kishino - a Japanese Noise Music composer, collaborate and create together, choosing recent evolutions of the Japanese society for their strong symbolism as the basis of their reflexion. This long-winded work has resulted in the cycle of performances called EDGING THE APOCALYPSE. The first part, EDGING, was first shown in the Ménagerie de Verre in Paris in 2013 and was inspired by the hikikomoris. For this second piece of work, RUIN PORN, the artists have chosen the phenomenon of haikyo (the Japanese word for « ruin ») and related it with dancing, performance and noise music. RUIN PORN is performed by four dancers and a musician. After starting our choreographic and dramatical research with EDGING (2013), we keep on investigating the phenomena that have recently appeared in Japan. Those sociological symptoms are fraught with symbolism and question the very essence of our current post-modern societies. Here, we mean to focus more particularly on the haikyo and more globally, on the whole concept of Dark Tourism. DARK TOURISM Dark Tourism consists in visiting places associated with death, suffering and catastrophes, in contemplating locations that the average traveler would regard as forbidden or hostile for social or ethical reasons. As Philip Stone, the director of the Institute For Dark tourism Research in the UK points out, Dark Tourism brings death back out in the open and enables visitors to reconnect with their own mortality. Over the last few years, the trend has risen with examples such as Tchernobyl and Auschwitz, and horror has now the status of an exhibit, likely to conjure up a rising tide of new tourists as well as a wave of perplexity. Whereas in western culture, the remnants of stone monuments are preserved and sanctuarized, in Japan, wooden constructions are regularly taken down or altogether destroyed, which is not a coincidence in a society primarily based on non-substantiality. For buddhists, things are impermanent and short-lived by nature and existence is actually and de facto a memento mori. Admiring vanishing constructions reminds one of the fleeting restlessness of things (« mujo » 無常) and that everything that once thrives is then bound to decay. HAIKYO 廃墟 Haikyo stands for ruin in Japanese, but also for the hobby of many urban explorers. Those adventurers/photographers are keen on keeping records of the traces left by our consumer societies, through pictures of forsaken places, like empty buildings, vacant lots and chaotic landscapes affected by natural catastrophes. Those ventures are of course illegal and require cunning strategies to be carried out and this is reflected in their outcome. Those pioneers offer an obsessive and technically very diverse testimony that maps out the edges of a civilization and highlights the frail boundary between the irretrievable past and a literally unimaginable future. They point out at what Giorgio Agamben calls Messianic Time, « this time time needs to expire, or the time we need for its representation to be over and done with ». RUIN PORN We mean our work to have a choreographic, aesthetic and political interest. We plan to borrow concepts used in photography and architecture, our ambition is to reveal our current society's unprecedented inability to elicit new utopias. In this creation, bodies become those haikyos, those zones yet to be explored, are by turns sublime, desecrated, scrutinized or immaterial, torn between a bygone past and an unthinkable future. With EDGING, we have started to conceptualize a corporal state and a physicality in a dual relationship we now plan to expand and share as a group. In both pieces, the bodies relentlessly reach out for an ever receding limit and shrink from it at the same time. They keep looking for a new path to a boundless pleasure fatally bound to escape them. Their gestures, the oscillation, the repetitions and time loops adulterate our perception and generate a new figure, the embodiment of what is in our eyes the gist of post-modern man. For this new creation, we have invited Etienne Bideau-Rey, a visual artist and stage designer , to explore with us the different aesthetic conceptions that can be related to the haikyo phenomenon. Els Deceukelier, Jan Fabre's muse and performer, Roger Sala Reyner, a dancer with interest in shamanic rituals, Suet-Wan Tsang, Cédrick Debeuf, Rebecca Florès, Abigail Fowler and Stéphane Monteiro, most of whom had already been part of the previous piece, make out for the rest of this international team. RUIN PORN (to be created in 2015-2016) and EDGING (created in 2013) are part of the cycle EDGING THE APOCALYPSE started in 2011. Edging the Apocalypse Igor Dobricic Edging the Apocalypse is not a title of the singular “dance performance” it is a code name of an extended, collective process of artistic research - a pretext for an ongoing collaboration between a growing international group of artists. Any “dance performance” emerging from this collaboration is a trace, a document of an unfolding shared exploration. As such, Edging the Apocalypse concerns itself with a most obvious, alarming symptom of our time - collective inability to imagine and enact urgently needed fundamental social, political and cultural change. Edging the Apocalypse is not attempting to propose or advocate parameters of a fundamental social change which we consider “unimaginable” but to map, to diagnose, in artistic and aesthetic terms, the given condition of (im)possibility and offer to a spectator such a diagnose as a shared performative experience. To edge the apocalypse is to maintain oneself at the threshold of transformation while endlessly postponing the moment of crossing. Our intention to capture, choreograph, stage such a contradictory condition of desiring the change while delaying it reflect our conviction that first decisive step toward overcoming social stasis consist not in exercising utopian imagination of “what is on the other side” but in mapping and presenting aspects of contemporary condition that prevent us from overstepping the border and plunging into the unknown. We do not consider such a mapping and a presentation as a rational critique of the status quo. In fact, we are convinced that contemporary critical thought with its double bind of analysis and utopian imagination is fully integrated into the protocol of avoidance, it is, in other words, yet another symptom of it, rather than a medicine that could heal us from our historical predicament and activate our will to change. We believe that the only route toward possible solution is in experiencing, embodying the problem in its pure and unconcealed form - performing it and implicating others (audience) inside of this performative experience rather than aiming to understand it theoretically. As such our method is the one of re-enactment rather than didactics, of intensification rather than rational contemplation from a distance. For us theatre stays a place of the experience not of discussion and a key question is which experience we need to re-visit, re-enact, so that we can start sensing (instead of understanding) our way out of it. Our answer to that question is clear. It is exactly the experience of our collective existence on the edge (of change, of catastrophe, of apocalypse) that we need to perform in all its intricate detail, all its elaborate trappings. Once again, our goal is not to criticize such a social and personal existence in which we are all implicated, but to re-live it in its condensed theatrical form so that spectator of it is seduced to partake in it rather than keep interpreting it. In other words, our goal is to amplify and exemplify what is suppressed so that we can imagine acting upon it. To reach toward a veil and pull it aside, realizing in this singular gesture not only that there is no ultimate truth hidden behind the curtain but furthermore that the gesture itself, sensation of movement unveiling the emptiness, is the only truth that we need to keep exercising. So what are the main components, the aspects of this experience that we desire to map and re-enact? Edging as a ritual When the need for personal or social change becomes frustrated by the opposing forces of conformity and conformism, the suppressed phantasy of transformation keep being performed symbolically, in the form of a ritual. Instead of generating decisive, singular brake with a past such a ritual is re-enacting the empty gesture of border crossing that is forcing the body, mind and spirit to oscillate indecisively between past and future without ever progressing forward. We are labeling this repetitive ritualistic gesture of suspension across and over the border of change as the edging. In sociological, political, economical terms, the edging is a permanent state of emergency and alarm - the never ending crisis without resolution. In psychological terms it is a morbid ecstasy of postponement in which issuing anxiety and uncertainty get converted into perverse enjoyment of forever delayed decision.