MOONI VAN TICHEL — STILL / ALIVE
N — Vier dansers bewegen in stop-motion op een vaste beat. Als onsterfelijke superhelden gaan ze eindeloos door in een cyclus van aanvallen, verdedigen, zweet afvegen en herladen. Schijnbaar moeiteloos bouwen ze verder aan hun ingebeelde super-lichamen en super-narratieven. Toch ontstaan er langzaamaan kleine barsten in hun grootse gebaren. Zijn ze klaar om de wereld te veranderen? Of zitten ze zelf vast in een systeem zonder uitweg?
In haar eerste groepsvoorstelling roept Mooni Van Tichel vragen op rond verlangen, geweld, macht, glorie, pijn en kwetsbaarheid. Wie heeft het recht zichzelf te verdedigen? Wie mag gewelddadig zijn zonder repercussies? En welk geweld wordt (on) zichtbaar gemaakt? Geïnspireerd door virtuoze lichamen, sciencefiction en de literatuur van Octavia Butler en Elsa Dorlin, gaat de choreografe op zoek naar utopische en dystopische wereldbeelden voor onze toekomst.
E — Four dancers move in stop-motion to a fixed beat. Like immortal superheroes, they endlessly engage in a cycle of attacking, defending, wiping sweat, and reloading. Seemingly effortlessly, they continue to build their imagined super-bodies and super-narratives. Yet, slowly, small cracks begin to appear in their grand gestures. Are they ready to change the world? Or are they themselves trapped in a system with no way out?
In her first group performance, Mooni Van Tichel raises questions about desire, violence, power, glory, pain, and vulnerability. Who has the right to defend themselves? Who can be violent without repercussions? And what violence is made (in) visible? Inspired by virtuosic bodies, science fiction, and the literature of Octavia Butler and Elsa Dorlin, the choreographer explores utopian and dystopian worldviews for our future.
The text below consists of two extensive excerpts that were important in the creation of STILL / ALIVE; the first one is from Gerry Canavan (on the work of Octavia Butler) and the second from Elsa Dorlin. They serve as a good introduction to the performance by the way they think about power, dominance and violence.
Excerpts of Bred to Be Superhuman: Comic Books and Afrofuturism in Octavia Butler’s Patternist Series by Gerry Canavan (2013)
“One of the things I’ve discovered even with teachers using my books is that people tend to look for “good guys” and “bad guys” which always annoys the hell out of me. I’d be bored to death writing that way. But because that’s the only pattern they have, they try to fit my work into it”
— Octavia
Butler
Butler’s rejection of a comic-book logic of heroes and villains is explicit. As her explanation goes on, however, it seems perhaps better to say that what she means is that she does not write about good - that she thinks people “doing the kinds of things people do” necessarily entails struggles for domination and control, the strong exerting themselves (to some degree or another, with some amount of constraint or another) on the weak. “Evil” is a forbidden category in her work precisely because she sees those behaviours we might naïvely wish to call “evil” as in fact completely ubiquitous.
What we find in Patternmaster [last book of the Patternist Series, a series of novels by Octavia Butler] then, is a vision of the superhero transformed from its familiar comic-book context and stripped of several key legitimating factors that ordinarily license its violence, leaving behind simply the raw struggle for dominance that Butler believed was integral to all life. From the seven defining motifs of the superhero detailed by Richard Reynolds, Patternmaster loses the hero’s devotion to justice, the mundanity of the superheroes’ urban milieu, the drama of the alter-ego, and the loyalty to the existing regime of law’s, leaving only the hero’s isolation from society, particularly his parents,’ the hero’s immense power, and the mythic nature of the stories.
DANS PERFORMANCE
DO 3 OKT - 20:30 STUK SOETEZAAL 60’
CONTENT WARNING DE VOORSTELLING BEVAT EXPLICIETE SCÈNES VAN GEWELD, LUIDE GELUIDEN, STROBOSCOOP, MOMENTEN VAN COMPLETE DUISTERNIS / THE SHOW CONTAINS EXPLICIT SCENES OF VIOLENCE, LOUD NOISES, STROBOSCOPIC LIGHT & MOMENT OF COMPLETE DARKNESS
HET IS VERBODEN FOTO’S OF VIDEO’S TE MAKEN | TAKING PICTURES OR RECORDING VIDEO IS PROHIBITED
CONCEPT & CREATIE MOONI VAN TICHEL PERFORMANCE COSTA TOMBROFF, ELI MATHIEU BUSTOS, MANON KANJINGA JANSSEN, MOONI VAN TICHEL DRAMATURGIE & CHOREOGRAFISCH ONDERZOEK ANTOINE DUPUY LARBRE LICHTONTWERP NIELS RUNDERKAMP KOSTUUMONTWERP STEFAN KARTCHEV GELUIDSONTWERP GIZEM KARAOSMANOĞLU OUTSIDE EYE KRYSTEL KHOURY, LUANDA CASELLA TECHNIEK CHRISTOPHE DEPREZ PRODUCTIELEIDING RIET MEEUS PRODUCTIE WORKSPACEBRUSSELS (BRUSSEL) COPRODUCTIE KUNSTENCENTRUM BUDA (KORTRIJK), KAAP (BRUGGE/ OOSTENDE), WORKSPACEBRUSSELS (BRUSSEL), A TWO DOGS COMPANY (BRUSSEL) RESIDENTIES A TWO DOGS COMPANY (BRUSSEL), CAMPO (GENT), CORSO (BERCHEM), KAAP (BRUGGE), KUNSTENCENTRUM BUDA (KORTRIJK), STUK (LEUVEN), WORKSPACEBRUSSELS (BRUSSEL) MET DE STEUN VAN DE VLAAMSE GEMEENSCHAP, DE VLAAMSE GEMEENSCHAPSCOMMISSIE (VGC)
Therefore, Patternmaster is, in effect, a superhero story stripped of basically all constraint, in which the power fantasy escapes the ideological bounds that usually rein it in. The Patternists are superheroes in a world in which human beings are primarily driven by Darwinist urges rather than ethical considerations - which is to say, the world as Butler understood it to exist. (...) Dominating each other, Butler suggests, is what we would actually do with superpowers.
(...) the superhero operates not so much “on the basis of force itself’ as “on the basis of the capacity to present force as being in the service of right and peace”. From this perspective even the nominal conservatism of the superhero is just a rhetorical posture; it is force itself, as such, that is the ultimate truth of the superhero behind all the slogans and all pretension to ethical investment.
Excerpt of To Be Beside of Oneself: Fanon and the Phenomenology of Our Own Violence by Elsa Dorlin (2017)
Violence for Fanon is an acting that we may qualify as irruptive, inventive, and fundamentally sensual. In my reading, violence is not only reactive, it is constitutive of a self-invention, a self-practice, which reaches away from the colonial regime in which the modern subject “putrefies.” Fanon thus tests
that which resembles a projection of the self outside of a foul temporality, and it is in this movement of projecting that the subject invents itself.
This projection is only possible through and in violence, because, as Fanon writes in The Wretched of the Earth, “at the individual level, violence is a cleansing force.” This is not to say that the subject preexists violence and that the latter arrives to reinstall the subject in his rights; the subject that Fanon wishes into being never existed. Fanon is interested in destroying the pathogenic subjectivity that maintains men and women in an abject selfhood. In this sense, colonial abjection is psychically toxic and violence is what creates subjectification. If the subject doesn’t preexist before violence, it is through violence that the subject becomes.