every now and then

The turning of pages

In the new piece every now and then, Mette Edvardsen and Philippe Beloul explore the book as a medium and challenge the idea of what happens with a performance after it is over. The audience is invited to read a book as a performance. The idea is to create a space and a time inside a book, like a play in a theatre. For the whole duration of the piece the audience can read through the pages and the spaces of a photo book at the same time as they follow what is taking place on stage. An individual intimate reading combined with a collective experience. The piece unfolds through the turning of pages, and the fantasy and imagination of the experience of a space, of a time, of a performance.

Mette Edvardsen: ‘For every now and then we consider the page to be a space. More than just a surface and “a floor” it is now a space with depth and perspective. I am interested in creating this dimension of a space on the page not only through representation, but also through the movements and actions we perform inside of it. In combination with the performance that takes place on stage, how can the space enhance the reading of the page in another way and make us experience it as “space”? And in return, how can the reading of the book enhance our experience of the performance and change the way we see, understand and imagine the space to be? I am interested in the relationship between the “small world” of the book and the “bigger world” of the theatre and how the notion of the book translates into the real space. How do we experience the performance on the page, and the other way around, how do we read the theatre space when we think of it as a page in a book?
   ‘The piece unfolds through the turning of pages and the imagination of a space, of a time, of a performance. We want to explore what takes place outside the pages, beyond the rooms, between the times, in the folds of the book, along the edges of space. With every turning of a page a new space appears, in layers on top of each other. How can we imagine such an architecture? Pages after pages of spaces bound together in a complex architecture called “a book”? Do we imagine a corridor where we move through space after space, or is it always the same the space and are we only moving through time? When a performer exits to the right on one page, will she enter from the left on the next page, or from the right? Does the space on the left page mirror the space on the right page? How does this affect our understanding of space and our movements on stage? How does this translate to reality, to the theatre? Is there a space behind the space that we see?
   ‘Is the space in every now and then the representation of the book or is the book the representation of the space? What came first, the book or the space? Is one a model of the other? Are we performers models of the figures in the book? Is the performance a memory of what was happening in the book, or is the book the trace of the performance? And if so, how can the book possibly exist before the performance is over?’