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Exploration into expression
IF YOU went to The Other Festival to see Susanne Kirchner in a ``contemporary solo dance'', you came away quite surprised but hugely satisfied even though you were trying to sort out the experience. Kirchner who teaches at the leading academies of art in Germany and performs in and out of the country explains her ``dance-sculpture'' as a ``focus on the development of contemplative, body sensitising training.'' For those of us at the performance that evening, it was a new and exploratory experience, intensely meditative in quality, somewhat like zazen (meditation), the study of the self. Body, breath and mind fused into one reality.
Susanne Kirchner in her early years trained as a classical singer but found herself seeking ways of using her body for expression. That is how she moved into this mode of performance and communication. In her journey she found that she was gaining more from the discipline of theatre than that of dance.
At a very visible level, Kirchner's performance for the evening involved bringing into being half a dozen sculptures, her body movement detailing the process of creation. Each process on completion would be frozen into stillness, and bathed in cold tenebrous light. Lights would fade out on the completed work and shine on Kirchner in another place on the stage beginning her work on the next piece. The nature of the light and the white skin-textured body suit gave the work a distinct marble quality. In overview the experience was the internalisation of the process Kirchner achieved by focusing on internal breathing, by slowing down her metabolism, slowing down her heart, and her breathing. The movements were slowed down to such an incredible pace that they were hardly perceptible, straining the muscles quite incredibly into stillness - particularly difficult if you want it to be graceful.
The utter silence in which she performed was simultaneously unnerving and exhilarating. She wanted neither music nor sound to distract the focus. The idea she said is for the body to communicate by going into a primal, pre-verbal movement. In addition to the energy she brings to her performance, she draws on the energy of the audience, when their focus gets locked into the performance.
By no means is it an easy exercise for the audience to sit in complete silence and darkness for close to an hour, in spite of ourselves and our preoccupations with internal dialogue, to be forced into slowing down the surface activity of the mind, to involuntarily follow our breath and finally to lapse into the comfort of stillness. And, out of that stillness to allow the wholeness of life to rise. This exercise of the mind being done with the body fit beautifully with what The Other Festival is trying to do: to explore new means of expression and new means of interpretation. New ways of giving meaning!
ELIZABETH ROY
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