dans sans joux

// PREMIERE

FOR THE TIME BEING [VICTORY OVER THE SUN]
a choreosonic performance

by DAP-Lab
directed by Johannes Birringer & Michèle Danjoux

at Lilian Baylis Studio - Sadler's Wells, London
Thursday/Friday, April 3 & 4,2014, 7:45pm
click here to book tickets
£ 13 / £ 11 (concession)
In person: Sadler's Wells, London, Rosebery Ave, EC1R
Telephone: +44 (0) 844 412 4300

"for the time being" was shown for the first time in 2012 at Watermans Art Center and then underwent expansion and revision during 201-14 before returning to Sadler's Wells where DAP-Lab staged its UKIYO dance installation in November 2010. The new choreosonic dance explores the sound of movement in a performance inspired by the Russian Futurist opera "Victory over the Sun" (1913) and its fantastical visual designs.

Taking a contemporary slant on the Futurian world imagined by this astonishing multimedia work of the early twentieth century, the maverick ensemble of the DAP-Lab performs its unique blend of design, choreography and live music in an intimate chamber work that looks at the fragmented home of our precarious existence in a world full of outworn cliches of revolutions.

Nearly a hundred years ago, the Futurists collaborated on an eccentric vision of a society to come, based on revolutionary fervor of the time. But "Victory over the Sun," an early example of what is now called performance art, was a most curious artefact, based on the collaboration between composer Matiushin, a painter and violinist, the painter Malevich, who later became famous for his abstract Suprematist paintings, the poet Kruchenykh, and poet/mathematician Khlebnikov who had invented a non-sense language called zaum. "We have come as far as the rejection of reason because another reason has grown in us which can be called 'beyond reason' and which also has law, construction, and sense ... ", Malevich said. It is possible that the sun, which in the opera is captured and eclipsed, is a symbol for reason itself, although it might also be a prophecy of solar or atomic power, "locked up in a concrete house" that seems to have exploded. Matiushin's music was a mysterious aspect of the original piece, since only 27 bars of the original score were believed to have survived.

DAP-Lab's new dance/music theatre work does not try to reconstruct the opera but uses its sound generated live by the performers, the special costumes designed by Danjoux, and the sound artists. Featuring eight performers, the dance incorporates body-worn-technologies where the structure of the wearable has been developed alongside its interactive and sound generating potential for gestural performance, tuned to basic movement processes of amplification, reduction, distortion, and noise/communication. Additional musical/dramaturgical ideas and media archaeological elements are introduced by Caroline Wilkins.

The Design and Performance Lab (DAP) is also pleased to announce that its wearable designs, created by Michèle Danjoux, have been featured on BBC World Service, in a special edition of the programme "Click" from the BBC’s radio theatre (live) on 25 February. This is an hour long programme looking at aspects of wearable technology, including DAP-Lab, Atau Tanaka, CuteCircuit, Google, etc. ... podcast is here : as well as on this page .

We will have films exhibited at Artbar, 28th February 2014 (opening night), MCA (Museum of Contemporary Art Australia), 140 George Street, The Rocks, Sidney NSW 2000, Australia. This event is curated by Chicks on Speed.

The "for the time being" [Victory over the Sun] project is supported by the Centre for Contemporary and Digital Performance at Brunel University, London and by a EU Culture Programme grant, as part of a five-year collaborative METABODY project with artists in several European countries

For further information or photos, email: michele.l.danjoux at googlemail.com


For more in formation on the design and performance concepts for
for the time being, visit our research notes

 

 

 

 

(c) Michèle Danjoux