BEARABLE COMPROMISE

by Adelaide Bentzon, Pernille Koch and Donovan Flynn

I´m part of something…I realize. I know but I forgot! I was born to be on the cover of a magasin but then again – so where you. Wait! It´s coming back to me now. Yes..no..yes here it is: I´m spinning around.. No that’s not it at all. Let me see you make decisions without your television. That´s it! Outside there´s more of the same only different. I used to do this better but then again so did you. It´s been months since i had any sleep. I´m listening to the sound coming from somewhere I can’t quite place, but it sounds like: zhhz. Look! This is where we are going. Don´t worry. It´s gonna be fine. It´s just that you get to go first. Frankie og Alice.

BEARABLE COMPROMISE is a performance about a failed experiment. An extreme situation and an odd consequens. On the edge of a minor catastrophy, two people find themselves off track. During their ways of finding old identities, possible personalities are applied randomly. Each has a memory of who they are supposed to be, and through different fragments they are able to construct some kind of identity. Perhaps it doesn’t exactly resamble the old one completely but it leads them to new outer as well as inner landscapes.

BEARABLE COMPROMISE stands between the epic and the pathetic. The bizarre humour occuring when all is down and every proportion turned upside down. The aim with this piece has been to investigate a scenic expression moving beyond genre definitions, and to focus on the ”story” as the primary. A story told as an absurd collage through movement, text and music. The material is created in close dialogue between the three – choreographer and performers. It is the continuation of a collaboration which began in Amsterdam 1997.

BEARABLE COMPROMISE was shown as part of 30 MINUTES at Teater Sthyr og Kjær, Copenhagen November 2000.
Duration: 31 minutes.

cast

By Adelaide Bentzon
In collaboration with performers Donovan Flynn and Pernille Koch

Performance2000

A Dance Docu Drama by Erik Pold
“The return of the real”

In his latest piece entitled PERFORMANCE2000, the Danish choreographer Erik Pold has invented a brand new genre: the Dance Docu Drama, a form that with a strong sense of humour combines different medias of “documentary video”, dance and performance.

Erik Pold has put together a group of 3 experienced performers and a video artist, to explore perceptions of reality and fiction, private and public at the beginning of the new millennium. PERFORMANCE2000 was made during the autumn 2000 in Copenhagen, and the premiere was part of an event entitled 30 MINUTES organised by Liminal.dk.

The making of PERFORMANCE2000
In the beginning of October 2000 Erik Pold went on a weekend-trip to a small cottage by the beach north of Copenhagen, he brought along three performers: Jeffrey Gunshol (US), Anders Christiansen (DK) and Trine Thiirmann Thomsen (DK), and the Amsterdam based video artist Helle Lyshøj (DK).
Here the “Dance Docu Drama” began, with a touch of “The Blairwitch Project”, they went “dancing on the beach” while the “Big Brother” camera kept rolling registering their every move.

After this one weekend together they went straight in front of an audience at the Copenhagen based gallery “Peblinc”, where the performers improvised in close proximity with an audience, during three sessions of 2 hour “durational performances”.

Five weeks later they ended up with the 40-minute piece PERFORMANCE2000.

The theme
It is central to contemporary living, that we concern ourselves a lot with identity, who we are seems defined by how we stage ourselves, almost like a “private performance”. In PERFORMANCE2000 we look for these performances, to figure out what it means to be a contemporary urban human being. We also take a look at where we are with our understanding of the word Performance, by investigating the “architecture of a dance piece”, trying to make it visible rather than hiding it. The desire to question what we are allowed to see on stage as part of a dance performance, but I guess essentially a desire to reach “behind the dancer”, to expose the way we perform and stage our lives. As a source of inspiration (as well as copying directly from it) we worked with the film Performance.

The Film “Performance”
The English filmmaker Nicolas Roeg (in collaboration with Donald Cammell), made a film in 1970 called “Performance”, it starred Mick Jagger in a leading role and made a link between being a “performer” as a rock star/artist, and being a very different kind of performer: a contract-killer. In an interesting way it caught the spirit of the early 70´s with experiments toward expanding our perception of gender, sexuality and reality.

The Danish reviewer Monna Dithmer wrote about the piece: PERFORMANCE2000 plays a subtle game with reality in its own loosely connected, funnily strolling manner. The reality project of Performance Art put in perspective and pushed to the edge as shameless entertainment.”