Language and dancing body: the gesture, premise and threshold of the imagination...
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"As it [dance] perceive things, in deed, to think of them without however naming them explicitly, explaining in his own way by the deictic Act, show, his expression field is not the rational but accented words that wake up feeling. In ice dancing, everything is that sense, confusion of meaning and essence, signs, symbolic meanings, code and language ; and because it's the human body, dance, everything is that fabric semiotique"1.
ML erases the boundaries of dance that becomes Visual writing, language that precedes the word and celebrates the dancing body. Considering dance as "acts of language", the body seized this angle can be found the heideggerian, i.e. its being - in-world Dasein2 in any consciousness induced by this mode of being.
This communication, before establishing himself and be perceived by the show or the demonstration of the body into exercise, is created by the gesture in which the dancer gives access to his sensitivity and his imagination. For ML, the dancing body is thought outside its materiality because it necessarily refers to an imaginary. By the work of the corporeal and the attention paid to the experience of the movement, the dancing body becomes refresh of the invisible. The physical body is access and language led work the artist and the viewer of the perceptual sphere in the sensitive sphere being the vector, the Messenger of another time it refreshes.
The gesture of the dancing body is the first impulse of his search for meaning. Although it may be intentional, 'perception fictive3' i.e. mental image in the gesture, it also develops below the intention and joined the unconscious world of fantastical wills or imaginary (or drives). The gesture thus precedes the movement and extends beyond the body, its sensitive imagination is inseparable from its action. This gesture, inscribed sphere in the space of a kinesphere, is the advent of the feel and the experience of a dematerialized, transcended, transfigured body language. In this experiment, the graphic model, whether or not it is static, appears as immediate an act energy footprint. ML takes the sensitive movement of dancers which she transcribed the trace to the image.
«These jacks on space [vision/gestures] are also taken on the Duration4», and plastic depth (overprinting, transparency) work is to consider not as something that unfolds before us but which encompasses us. Plastic space is then also temporal because it contains the time of the dancing body like this can contain the room's. In other words, considering the space rather than in terms of distance and line but in terms of content (where the body is and plays), color can flourish and transmit us its dimension. It is then "where our brain and the universe will meet [...], that creates its own identity, differences, a texture, a materiality, one some chose"5. His figurative participation (color made and defeated forms) combined with pixels - as the number pad, minimum unit forming dye - arises remembrance. The work of the join between the universe and the subject is none other than the working memory, the outcrop or remoteness of remembrance. It is a work on the duration (time of the individual according to Bergson) in which the digital image (frame or video) we offer under its movements time lived and imagined. The gesture extended to the time, becoming bearer of memory, blurs the boundaries between the real and the imaginary. Vivid/imagined experience can then claim the same level of the perceptive reality and consequently - the real perceived being ever imagined - us open upside invisible things.
Ophélie Soumbou Leclerc, April 2015
according to works and research papers of the artist
- the dancing body to its Image: perception, interpretation and writing-2008-2010
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1 COLETTE-FOLLIOT, Valérie, « La danse comme actes de langage » in Programme de l'option dans L3 ASU,
juin 2006, dans le cadre du Département des Arts du Spectacle de l'Université de Caen, Basse Normandie.
Disponible au format pdf sur http://danselab.free.fr/textes/pdf/programme_optiondanse_20062007.pdf
2 HEIDEGGER, Martin, Être et Temps, Paris, Gallimard, collection Bibliothèque de Philosophie, 1986
3 SUQUET, Annie, « Le corps dansant, un laboratoire de la perception », in Histoire du Corps (dir. Jean-Jacques Courtine), Tome 3, Les mutations du Regard, le xxᵉ siècle, Paris, Le Seuil, 2006, p. 413
4 MERLEAU-PONTY, Maurice, L’œil et l'esprit, Paris, Gallimard, collection Folio essais, 1970, p. 80
5 Citation de Paul Klee in Ibid., p. 67
