Crash / Dissemblance performance

Tagawa Elsa (asbl leprojetgéo / Compagnie Elsa Tagawa)

• Performance

In the construction of stories, epics and founding myths, death plays a central role, as does the narrative that justifies its distribution. Over the past two centuries, the distribution of death has undergone changes linked to technical and technological progress. It seems that the distribution of death is in perfect symbiosis with its justification.
Whether pronounced in legal terms, populist through slogans, or exalted by technology, the fact is that in various professions, killing has become an act involving no individual responsibility. Everything is mechanized, subdivided and opaque. The sensitive part of the condemned subject is invisibilized.
The performance explores the different logic and mechanics that may lie behind the act of giving death (lack of empathy, exculpation, dehumanization). In a monolith measuring 360 cm by 360 cm (pictures in the visual file), the dancers, whose faces and identities are blurred by translucent walls, represent and interpret figures that are often present in situations where the power to give death is exercised. The movement will be constructed by repeated deaths, bodies in fall, in decline and suddenly propelled by surges of slaughtering gesture and in decadence again. The bodies will die repeatedly to reveal an absurdity and a death limited in its destiny, ricocheting from one wall to the other of the scenographic
structure. Deprived of visual empathy with the performers, spectators can only relate to the shadows and sound of falling bodies on the walls of the cube (amplified and spatialized by a sound installation).
A slit in the floor lets out a dark liquid that gradually invades the stage until the spectator's feet are in the footprints of the tragedy, carrying with them a mark, a responsibility for what they have witnessed.
The multiplication of sentences, justifications and killings accelerates and intensifies until fatigue wins out, and the bodies no longer have the resources to distribute death or even to receive it, and death itself loses all potentiality. This creates a moment of resilience and silence, where the bodies' only challenge is to perfect their death so that it becomes fruitful.