gone here (yet) to come

Tangible darkness

This text was written by fieldworks, more information on the playdates and credits are to be found here.

We move from plan A to B to C to D.

While everything is on hold, we pretend, we simulate, we try to continue and make do. While we reconsider the history that is our point of reference, we imagine the future in which we will all be here together again. We collaborate across distances and stage the spaces in which presently absent performers may one day make an appearance.

We move in and out and focus on the space beyond the visible. The worlds underneath the surface we walk on. The landscapes under our feet. The layers beyond what is shown.

In gone here (yet) to come, the theatre space becomes a canvas onto which different realities are projected. The performance molds and sculpts the space and the air that fills it. It transforms time. It highlights what lies outside of this space: its margins and edges, and what pours in through the cracks and holes in the boundaries that define it. Digging, deeper and deeper, into the space and the time of the theater, gone here yet to come excavates lost memories. (g)hosts guide the audience on a journey, revealing other versions or dimensions of the theatre/world as we know it.

The choreography explores ways of connecting, invisibly, kinesthetically. It variously strings together people, things, ideas and worlds. The performers try to hold the line and keep it together, to maintain a sense of security and stability. Numerous visible and imperceptible threads connect across the space to reveal it as a densely woven fabric.

In the course of the performance, the space is continuously undone and refigured. Even when it is emptied, this space remains marked by the multitude of traces of previous actions, operations, movements, trajectories, and objects. What else can these traces become? What can such ‘leftovers’ generate? The performance explores paths taken and not taken, avenues explored and not explored.

gone here (yet) to come engages with the material of performance that tends to remain imperceptible. It visualizes the absences that are nevertheless very present. Lines laid out, trajectories charted, landscapes constructed and deconstructed, appearances and disappearances staged, perspectives shifted and reoriented.

Today’s new present presents itself as a challenge, as yet another space in which and with which to work, another space to interrogate, to infiltrate, to adapt to, and to subtly shift, from the inside out.

This strange in-between (time)zone we are currently in evokes the dark, darkness.

Being surrounded by darkness heightens the senses, tenses the nerves, blurs edges and boundaries, time and space. Which other realities, encounters, and relationships become perceptible or possible in utter darkness? In gone here yet to come, darkness becomes tangible. It operates as a connecting tissue, as a dense network of relationships between places and times, organic and inorganic matter, human and non-human beings. The performance zooms in on boundaries and in-between zones, on transitions and shadows. Darkness here operates as a murky zone full of potentialities, where matter, beings and ideas flow together, get entangled and disentangle themselves.

Biographies

Heine Avdal (Norway) has been active in the fields of contemporary dance, performance, video and visual arts. After studying at the Oslo National College of the Arts (1991-94) and PARTS 1995-96 (Brussels), he worked as a performer for various companies. He also collaborated with Mette Edvardsen, Liv Hanne Haugen, and Lawrence Malstaf on the performance installation “Sauna in Exile” (2005 - 2006),  and choreographed “horizontal plane“ (2010) for the Norwegian National Contemporary Dance Company Carte Blanche. Since 2000, Heine Avdal created and produced more than 20 different performing arts projects, most often in collaboration with Yukiko Shinozaki.

In recent projects, Heine Avdal’s focus has been on the distribution of space. He questions how spatial conventions affect the way we experience and move through private/public spaces. Considering people’s preconceptions of spatial conventions and through slight shifts, or manipulations he searches for unexpected intersections between different components of a space. In this context, Avdal also questions how technology is being used or, can be used in acquiring new meanings and perceptions on the human body and on our daily surroundings. He investigates the blurred distinction between what is artificial and what is organic.

Yukiko Shinozaki (Japan) studied classical ballet in Tokyo from age 6 to 18. After high school, she moved to the US to study contemporary dance and psychology at Portland State University. From 1993 to 1997 she lived in NYC, where she presented her own work at venues including the Judson Church, St Mark’s Church, and the Merce Cunningham Studio. She also danced in productions by Yasemeen Godder, Raimund Hoghe, Meg stuart, and many others. Since moving to Brussels in 1997, Yukiko Shinozaki created “Breaking through the roof of its house” (2005) and “Inner Horizon” (2005) together with French Visual artist Christelle Fillod, and “hibi” (2007) with Japanese choreographer Un Yamada. For over 20 years Shinozaki has been collaborating with Heine Avdal on several productions.

Shinozaki’s work focuses on internal complexities and contradictions of the body. The process of transformation takes an important role in her movement vocabulary: through subtle shifts and manipulations, familiar actions slowly transform into an unfamiliar realm/landscape. She considers artistic collaborations as an important factor in her work and she consciously integrates coincidental elements that arrive in encounters with different artists and situations. She often works in an intuitive way, yet she is also fascinated by something beyond her imagination.

Avdal and Shinozaki together started their own company fieldworks (formally named 'deepblue').
Since 2000 more than 20 productions were created, which all have been touring internationally.

The various productions are concerned with “performativity” and allow for an open interpretation of movement as a heterogeneous combination of a variety of media. Consequently, the artists draw on a broad range of disciplines and expertise: performance, dance, visual arts, video, music, and technology.

Every performance plays on the tension and contrast between the body and objects, the body and the mind, fact and fiction/representation, the tangible and the invisible, the organic and the artificial, ...  Recurrent themes in the productions include the relationship between performer and spectator, the non-hierarchical approach to the various elements of a performance, and the exploration of both theatrical and non-theatrical environments.

fieldworks productions are made for a wide variety of locations/settings, both public and private; for the theatre: you are here (2008), nothing's for something (2012), a supermarket: Borrowed Landscape (2013), a hotel room: Field Works-hotel (2011), an office: Field Works-office (2010), a concert hall: The Otheroom (2016 - a collaboration with contemporary music composer Rolf Wallin), or even a whole building and its surroundings: the site-specific project carry on (2015-2021). unannounced (2017) is a performance on fragmentation of time and space that blurs the conventional distinctions between the ‘outside’ and the ‘inside’ of the aesthetic event, and that takes place in the black box as well as in its surrounding rooms, halls, corridors, foyer, offices, storage,…

Avdal and Shinozaki’s latests work gone here (yet) to come is a piece for the stage inspired by the tactility of darkness. Currently they are working on a new outdoor site-specific project in gaps & patches.

For a full overview of all performances, see fieldworks website www.field-works.be