L’œil la bouche et le reste

The pre-human

After a series of solos, Volmir Cordeiro has created his first work for four dancers. In L’œil la bouche et le reste, he invites you to change your perspective on sight. He starts with the eye and then extends his exploration to all spherical things: the sun, an egg, the moon, an arena. He has created a dance that aims to express the physical movement and behaviour of the eye: crying, staring, winking, spying… The interior, the hidden and even the pre-human and cannibalistic is exposed in this intense, almost obsessive inquiry into dance, and into the ineffable itself.

• This is Brazilian dancer and choreographer Volmir Cordeiro’s first appearance on the Kaaitheater programme. He has previously performed on our stage as a dancer, however, in The Clean and The Dirty (2016) by Vera Mantero.

‘That’s what I call the rest; the thing without a name, which cannot be looked at, subterranean, lost and unattainable; this matter capable of making us close our eyes and then cry out inside, and open our sight towards what we dare not look at. Dancing a dance that is embodied by the eye, dancing what the eye is unable to retain when it is in the process of looking, dancing what is left over in us, forgotten, rejected, set aside, dancing the obsessive fear of what one sees.’ – VOLMIR CORDEIRO