INVSBL PPL by gustavo miranda > images from a performing act > gustavo
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INVSBL PPL
GUSTAVO MIRANDA
Last updated : 13/06/2011PRINT THIS PAGEOutline
"In our culture you only exist when you’re in the picture." (Daniëlle De Regt – VTi-Courant 89
INVSBL PPL deals with questioning images of public domain by deconstructing and recomposing them. The piece is about über-highlighting the visual and movement particularities of the performers in deep interaction with the particularities of video language. I.P. aims the point where extreme plasticity turns into graspable energy / information. We re-organize the elements composing pictures of people (angles, distances, codified gestures, roll defining positions, make-up, light…) INVSBL PPL concentrates into extreme aesthetic & movement to extract the information content behind the images.
Performers and their recorded images have a similar status as performing entities. There are no conflict based dramatic relations. Video and dancers are multiple players of the same rolls. We are in strict partnership with our own images.
The show is about undressing & manipulating ready-made images to recreate unusual, unconventional, unexpected points of view.
The content comes from images found in mass media > passes through a distortion-in-motion > zooms in & out the potential strangeness behind daily gestures and goes to inquire the human behind the picture.
The vehicle is an inherent interaction between the awareness of performing images & human-sized-video.
Verbs leading the visual construction are: to dazzle, to see through, to shine, to outshine, to reverse, to darken, to show, to really see, again, to move, to remove, to replace, to place, change angle, change performer, enlighten, change medium to change point of view… cover any apparent obvious & compose images of exception.
We'll make games of adjectives & games of metaphors to give sense to each 'character', picture or scene. Simple strategies such as completing phrases:
This situation might be …… This guy is an …… In this moment she might have…… If i was in such position I would probably feel ……
The potential strangeness behind daily gestures will be generated by those verbs, adjectives & metaphors. A sort of supporting grammar for a consistent visual language.
Context is set by the exceptional visibility of Barak Obama. Nevertheless INVSBL PPL is not about Barak Obama, but rather how people-in-images can re-set paradigms & remain influent on our daily perception… The print of images in our eyes. It's regardless if the guy in tie has or not real power of decision.
Obama's images suggest a first row citizenship. Obama's image in such position in the whole world's communication media is an undeniable aesthetic shift for non european looking people. Watching the chair taking ceremony from Asia brought me to realize the symbolic shift it means for millions of people. Barak Obama's mediatic presence is the largest misplaced visual object in as many years as one can remember.
"Every research on theatrical aesthetics is blind if, in its artistic practice it doesn't recognize the reflection on the social norms of perception and behavior." Hans-Thies Lehmann in Postdramatisches Theater.
Critical observation of image/information in the mass media reveals a major contrast between the social status of Barak Obama and corpses in poor country's wars, rappers, Kenian runners, basketball players, world music artists, night life entertainers, … the contrast endorses Obama's status as a misplaced visual object. Not everybody is in picture? Or rather who's in which picture? The replacement, mise-en-perspective, and abstractive reconstruction of images is what INVSBL PPL goes for. Turning critical observation into a dramaturgy of images. We account as well the less format obedient imagery found online…
Without external images, INVSBL PPL focus on the particularities of the performers to create sharp and extreme aesthetic work beyond the matter it treats.
C O N S T R U C T I O N
INTRO >> Recomposing the visual codes which make us recognize the types mentioned above.
DEVELOPMENT
>> Re-forming gestures into movement and new gestures.
>> After having developed each 'character' in a parallel editing*(film structure tool) We'll gradually mix them in the piece's timeline.
>>Play with the "decomposed-ingredients-of-gestures" as well as "imageperception-components": angles, distances, brightness, contrasts, make-up, light in the room & on screens…
>> We pass to the level of video editing manipulation. (Video gaming the information according to Paul Virilio's observations on speed and power in "War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception")
Both live and on the screen: rewind, fast forwards, reverse, slow motion, cut… replace by another performer replace by another medium, repeat, compare… (with sound relative of those video editing manipulations)
>> Mixing and making a memory game out of the most remarkable movements, roll defining gestures & striking plastic/aesthetic events.
ENDING Towards the end of the performance we focus on humanizing the images, reconverting the most visible man in suit & all the others above from a social function (what you do) to private life images (what you are).
At home: beyond the social status... beyond the radical aesthetics … lays the further questions around the happinesses and the miseries common to all human beings… INVSBL PPL brings no answer. But we can upgrade levels of reflection with deadly entertaining images.
the politician tired & smoking, the basket baller feeling sick weak & powerless, the corpse from a war resurrecting, the runner arriving on his/her sheets at home, the rapper on the mirror in the morning, a disco queen undoing her make up in tears…
INVSBL PPL put the finger on the codes of image from the point of view of those who's identity as portrayed in mass media does not seem to be an all areas access. This show is an outcome for a "specific critical observation" to which I'm exposed in daily life through the eyes of others… Or Am I as paranoid as Jaques Derrida?
INFORMED BY:
*Deconstruction of elements which form (pre)conceived ideas was central in the philosophic oeuvre of Jaques Derrida. This principle is directly applied to deconstruction (& reconstruction) of gestures, movements, roll definitions, facial postures, light elements, camera positions, make-up… Zooming in… paradoxally allows to zoom out…
*Jim Jarmusch's film "Limits of Control" is for me a paradigm of quality in the use of lights, as well as construction of artistic discourse out of an accumulation of semi-abstract characters.
*In the exhibition "Light InSight" in the ICC center in Tokyo/Shinjuku I've witnessed experiments which are of great influence for how I wanna approach energy coming out of the images.
*Films of Michelangelo Antonioni are an excellent reference on perspectives and the making of exceptional images. Antonioni's films are full of "carefully strange & harmoniously misplaced" visual objects, his films also formally deal with what the author himself called "the event horizon".
Antonioni was a former architect who made his first films around the age of 40 years old. His work is still nowadays experienced as revolutionary, and paradigmatic. According to Antonioni event horizon means: laying an artistic discourse until a point where some event completely changes the watching perspective. Once we travel all the way to 'stand on the horizon' we're able to see things from completely different perspectives.
Credits
- Concept: Gustavo Miranda
- Performing: Ligia Manuela Lewis, Gustavo Miranda
- External Eye: Manon Santkin
- Costumes: Gustavo Miranda
- Light: Koen Raes
- Music: Luc Mishalle
- Sound design: Jozef Devillé
- Video: Christoph Oertli
- Research period has been supported by Met-X, workspacebrussels, De Pianofabriek.
Dates
18/04/2011 - 30/04/2011 / Rosas
24/05/2010 - 6/06/2010 / Kaaistudio's
Other productions
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