bees-R [bɪˈzɑː] focuses on the creation of dance and multi-genre productions with international relevance
Rehearsing for the showing
@ Studio Alta - Bazaar Festival - The Nature of Us Project
Dancers : Edita Antalová, Jana Tereková, Lukáš Zahy
Part 3 [30/12/2021]
SEARCHING FOR THE UNCANNY
How to bring a feeling of uncanny into the movement? How to create unmatching associations and discrepancies in one body in order to destabilize the perception?
The stereotypes executed by animals in distress look weird, troubling and uncomfortable to the public. A strange sensation that something doesn’t match is present.
The challenge for our research started to be serious at this point. We are not interested in walking. We are not looking just for a loop that can be executed for a very long time and that doesn’t hurt the body. We are looking to find the sensation of weirdness in the dance : in the quality of movement, in the posture, muscular tension, coordinations and dissociations between body parts, timing. Destabilising the concepts of human and animal: what are their believed characteristics which may be switched? Destabilising the belief concerning the gravitational laws, the expected behaviours of different body parts, granting them an independent existence, making them „floating limbs“, living their own life. Or vice versa, making them become objects, making the whole body become an object.
We were exploring numerous associations of movements of non-matching nature mechanic, geometric, (non)functional - and forms which could evoke more human-like creatures or something else.
What experience have had the dancers, what has the research done to their bodies? They will talk about it in the next blog.
“The uncanny arises from the [...] doubt as to the living or non-living nature of an object, the double in all its forms and the intersection of reality and fiction”
(Susanne MULLER : L’Inquiétante Étrangeté à l’œuvre. Das Unheimliche et l’art contemporain.)
“ [T]the fantastic as uncanny is manifested in a culture in which it is now believed that the miracle is not possible, and everything should be able to be explained according to the laws of nature, for which time cannot go back, an individual cannot find himself simultaneously in two places, objects have no life, humans and animals have different characteristics, and so on.
The inexplicable appears, then, when we no longer find a room or a street that we knew very well, the same facts are reproduced several times, a puppet comes to life, what was believed to be a dream or a nightmare turns out to be reality [...] Finally, the culmination of the inexplicable is the appearance of our look-alike, that is, the double. ”
(Umberto ECO : Storia della Bruttezza)