LIVING PICTURE #5
Living Picture #5 was inspired by a sadness one morning. I felt empty and lonely; that's quite common. But that day, I discovered an unusually calm and melancholic piece of music by Massive Attack. So I decided to write a choreography for a solo dancer. In this case, only me, dressed in black.
I finally decided to dance as a couple, or trio, after making the connection between my sadness and a short story I had written a few years ago: alone together.
The text of the short story is written in a loop in the local chat :
"It was while looking towards the ocean, watching a small fishing boat sailing quietly out to sea, that she felt relief, as if the bag of lead that she had been carrying on her shoulders for years had suddenly fallen at her feet. The sight of this sailing boat (because it was really something she saw, in front of her, as a picture that had have any sense at first, but which, through the filter of her brain, became a fiction) provoked in her two distinct sensations.
First, she identified so much with this small trawler, so much so that she was felt that she observed herself, separated from her body, gaining altitude and watching herself sitting on the beach. She no longer judged herself good or bad, beautiful or ugly, instead she looked at herself kindly, and this new view of herself gave her a sense of freedom she had never experienced before.
Then, she accepted the paradox of keeping herself to herself because she had finally come to hate the others, whilst owing them everything; the guilt that she existed only through her parents, her teachers, lecturers, books written by others, and her random encounters, while abhoring all that constituted the human species today. That guilt was gone.
Like that little fishing boat that had left the harbor and rushed towards the horizon, she had left her parents, the Protestant school, the International University, her first job, to go to earth, out of the city. But she did her fair share of work. She fished and sometimes the fishing was miraculous. She fled to the edge of the world, but she always made the effort to return, and she shared her catch in the port’s great market, amongst the human turmoil where everyone, caught up in the flow of urgency, was alone together. She could turn her back on all those who made her grow, provided that she, too, agreed to tell what she saw there, that which only she had witnessed. Now she could wait in peace for the Flood.."
