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Urban space performance ● live video dance ● interview ● live sound ● live web broadcast ● role ● programming interface for live video dance 2008 - 2014

In this creation, the dance company t.r.a.n.s.i.t.s.c.a.p.e explores the relationship between fiction and reality in a public space and with a high degree of participation.

Chambre(s) d’Hôtel is an urban installation combining a performance and a radio interview. A single architectural object, a hybrid and technoid caravan, combines a piece of fiction and a reality which are layered on top of each other during the 2 x 50 minutes of the performance.

Chambre(s) d’Hôtel is a travelling hybrid device, an urban transplant that is experienced as a transit location loaded with possibilities, a breaking moment where each encounter defines the next day. Experimental film, dance and a testimonial are layered together, forming a narrative puzzle in this tense piece of work that is all about identities and territory.

Video above: Documentation of performance at Centre Pompidu, during La Nuit Blanche de Paris, France. Live video dance excerpts from Festival Mötel Mozaique,  Rotterdam, Netherlands.

Performance

Concept

The choreography of the injury

The choreography, fragmented in 10 sequences, looks into the concepts of Injury and the Disturbance of habits. It is inspired by a world of trajectories, curves, breaks, abstract schemes that constitute a person’s environment today. We explore various mechanical and systematic gestures and movements.

The body is shown in all its aspects, gestures reign over words, the language of movement is predominant and cancels out speech. As a consequence, it is the body that is thinking. It produces and conveys the language. The sober, precise, controlled play is executed with speed, repetition and energy. The three dancers grip into each other, reject each other, fight and wrestle for survival.

In the sequence The dog and the bird, the repeated violent acts of a couple lead to a kind of uncontrolled pulse. The violence of the body as opposed to the space is exacerbated. Gestures are carried out in a mechanical fashion and reveal the border between individuals and their territory. The fascination and fear conveyed in a hotel room are reflected in the sequences were sex, violence and loneliness are brought to the foreground. We witness the fragility of people confronted with themselves.

Team

Chorégraphie, scénographie et mise en scène ● Pierre Larauza & Emmanuelle Vincent
Performeurs ● Alfredo Fernandez Atienza, Ana Cembrero Coca, Emmanuelle Vincent & Invité(e) local(e) pour l’interview radio
Création sonore pré-enregistrée ● Alexander MacSween
Création sonore live ● Jorge Piquer Rodriguez
Montage video live ● Pierre Larauza
Intervieweuse et assistante mise en scène ● Cécile Cozzolino
Régisseuse plateau et assistante scénographie ● Sarah Jacobs
Régisseur général ● Serge Payen
Régisseur réseau ● Hadrian Bnin-Bninski
Programmation vidéo digitale ● Maxim Surin
Construction ● t.r.a.n.s.i.t.s.c.a.p.e et Eric Mercenier

Locations

Live dance-video

The performance consists of the real time creation of a dance video, shot with 5 cameras inside the caravan filming the 3 dancers. The film, split-up in 10 sequences, is edited in real time and then broadcast on a screen on one of the sides of the caravan and anywhere needed. The caravan, with its bay window, allows the audience to simultaneously watch the live dancing and the live-edited film.

Synopsis « Three characters whose destinies meet in a hotel room: A boxer about to retire, in transit between his last fights, A call girl who brings her customers to this room, A chambermaid, witness or accomplice to the intimacy of its inhabitants.»

Here the film and dance actions are inextricably linked.
The use of cameras creates both a movement away from and a sudden intrusion into reality. The camera captures the significant movements of the face. To quote Gilles Deleuze: “The affectionate image is the close-up, and the close-up is the face, …». He also reminds us that Eisenstein suggested the close-up is not only a type of image among many others, but that it confers an affective reading to the entire film. So the face is the close-up.

The images play with the scene but the dancers don’t watch the resulting image. That’s why we can see a dancer’s back and at the same time his or her face in the video screen. The details accentuate the drama and the facial expressions show what is invisible. Through the framing, we can choose to reveal or hide the wider picture.

The video delivers a fragmentation of the field of perception and splinters the performance space. It becomes an instrument that shatters and dissipates the body. The faces, as if they were detached from their bodies and perched on the screen, watch, observe, spy on the upset spectator, who is offered several viewpoints. Chambre(s) d’Hôtel enables the experience of a dialogue between the living flesh and the digital body.

Live radio interview

Parallel to the performance, a radio booth broadcasts (and allows to see) a real time interview with a person who is a chambermaid, boxer or call girl. While they are watching the interview, spectators can listen to it through headphones hanging from the caravan.

At the same time it is being broadcast on our web radio where all the testimonials are also archived.

In each city where we perform, we will find local people to be interviewed and advertise for potential interviewees with an announcement :
« If you are a boxer, call girl or room maid and want to testify during one of our next performances, please send an e-mail to info@transitscape.net. »

Sound as a double perception

Chambre(s) d’Hôtel, as a fusion between dance and video, also pays great attention to sound and creates a visual universe beating to the rhythm of electronic music.

La musique est diffusée à l’extérieur via des hauts parleurs autour de la caravane.
The pre-recorded music by composer Alexander MacSween (Canada) and live music played Jorge Piquer Rodriguez (Spain) project us into a double sonic environment that encapsulates and stimulates all our senses and leads us to discover new horizons.
Musics are played outside through speakers all around the caravan.
The sound, designed on various levels, colours the space and delivers mathematical precision. It unites, divides, splits up and alienates the sequences one after the other, keeping the audience in a state of tension.
By layering analogue keyboards on top of a digital system, he constructs a music that always tries to trick us, producing aural, timbral and rhythmical illusions.

Tour

Rencontres Art Vu, 2014, Amiens, France
Augusti TantsuFestival, 2011, Tallinn, Estonia
Nuit Blanche de Bruxelles, 2010, Brussels, Belgium
Festival FACYL, 2010,  Salamanca, Spain
Festival Mötel Mozaique, 2010,  Rotterdam, Netherlands
Festival Electron, 2010, Geneva, Switzerland
Festival DansCamDanse, 2009, Ghent, Belgium
Biennale de Charleroi-danses, 2009, Charleroi, Belgium
Festival Nouveaux auteurs, 2009, Halle, Germany
Festival Chalon dans la rue, 2009, Chalon-sur-Saône, France
Festival VIA, 2009, Mons, Belgium
Festival EXIT, 2009, Créteil, France
Festival Les Folies / City Sonic, 2008, Maubeuge, France
La Nuit Blanche de Paris, 2008, Paris,  France

Live video stills

Setup

Articles de presse (extrait)

« In a time when we are destroying walls, when we witness the vanishing of the boundaries that until now protected our privacy and enclosed the artist –and the audience– in a defined, achieved, reassuring space, contemporary theatre questions everything.

Whereas usually caravans isolate, the one of the t.r.a.n.s.i.t.s.c.a.p.e collective (Pierre Larauza and Emmanuelle Vincent) sees itself literally converted into a platform, a stage where each event becomes a performance. With ‘Chambre(s) d’Hôtel’, the paradoxical idea of a shared private space is at stake. The three individuals who appear – a boxer, a call girl, a chambermaid –, produce singular gestures which, captured on video and live, recreate a new space in which the spectators suddenly find themselves to be voyeurs. ‘Chambre(s) d’Hôtel’, with its fusion between various media and the almost involuntary intrusion in this usually forbidden location, contains its own criticism and questions those who take part in the game about their place in the performance. In the end, who will violate the other’s view: the performers or the casual passers- by? In all its disturbance and indecency, this is probably a work beneficial to the greater well-being.»

Mathieu Laviolette-Slanka, Evene

« Le public peut choisir de se saisir d’un casque pour écouter les interviews et être baigné dans l’ambiance intérieure de la caravane, ou bien choisir de rester observateur extérieur et écouter la musique diffusée dans l’espace public.

La vitre de la caravane se remplit de buée au fur et à mesure que les corps suent. Cette multiplicité d’entrée – polyphonie des voix, corps, sueur, espace confiné, et à l’autre bout, le streaming envoyé sur le Net – nous laisse toucher du doigt que nos vies réelles à venir prendront leur essence dans un espace virtuel.

Elle redonne au terme contemporain – trop souvent considéré comme un repoussoir – la réalité qu’il recouvre : des gens d’aujourd’hui qui parlent aux gens d’aujourd’hui, en essayant de les toucher d’un point de vue humain. Une grande aventure. »

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