UNDERTONE

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UNDERTONE

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SIDNEY LEONI

Last updated : 09/04/2012PRINT THIS PAGE

Outline

Undertone is a choreography that focuses on the potentials of sensory perception of the audience. Stemming from the interest to challenge spectatorship and destabilize the convention of watching performance, Undertone invites the audience in a complete dark space to participate in an orchestration of fictional spaces. Hereby, the performance prioritizes mechanisms of perception other than vision by proposing an immersive experience of different kinds of stimuli.

In Undertone, the body of the audience members is considered in all its potentiality to sense and navigate within an environment composed of a large spectrum of sensory movements such as tastes, sounds, smells, temperature fluctuations, touches, and ephemeral scenographies

Statements on the making of:

To remove spectatorship and destabilizing known ways of “watching” performances.
To engage the audience and the performers as active members of a collective event.
To propose in/audible stimulations, smells and subtle physical contacts in order to create performance as a situation of sensory stimulation and experience.
Principles on how to treat and divide the sensorium:
- to cancel one/several sense(s) in order to enhance other(s).
- to emerge, submerse, dis-locate or amplify one sensorial operator (such as sound, smell, light, touch) in the space.
- to mix, enhance and cancel several kinds of one sensorial operator under sub-divisions such as: artificial/natural, subtle/overcharged, pleasant/unpleasant, analogue/digital, passive/active, static/transformative, personal/collective, …
To aim for subtleties that would be coupled with an overcharge, as an interest to make tiny little things going on in the theater space to gain an impact, which would be incongruous to their “size” or “weight”, as an intertwinement of perception.
To venture into situations where the notion of Individualism merges into the one of Community, and vice-versa.
To explore social situations which bring about sensible encounters between strangers. Something related to secrecy, social awkwardness and unspoken rules of behaviour. That is where one has to acknowledge her/his behaviour while taking part of the situation.
To not be able to totally pre-determine what is going to happen in the space and how people will behave and react.
To stir the spectators into a zone that is never fully comfortable and certain without however being the opposite.
To produce specific and simple tasks for performance making in order to transmit this choreography to a large amount of performers within a short time frame (with the use of a score).

Credits

Concept and Choreography: Sidney Leoni (fr/se)
Developed together with Manon Santkin (be), Luís Miguel Félix (pt), Peter Lenaerts (be), Andros Zins-Browne (usa/be), Guillem Mont de Palol (sp), Laurent David Garnier (fr), Marcus Doverud (se) and other guests.
Performers: Manon Santkin, Luís Miguel Félix, Andros Zins-Browne, Tom Engels (be), Guillem Mont de Palol, Martin Lervik (no), Helga Guren (no), Ivar Furre Aam (no), Benjamin Quigley (se), Christina Vantzou (usa/be), Halla Olafsdottir (ic), Amanda Apetrea (se), Ingrid Rusten (no), Mariana My Suikkanen Gomes (se), Linnéa Backgård (se), Andrea Csaszni Rygh (no), Ludvig Daae (no), Mattias Lech (se)
Sound designer Peter Lenaerts (be)
Fragrance design Laurent David Garnier (fr)
Technique Nick Symons (be)

Funded by Konstnärsnämnden, the Swedish Arts Grant Committee.
Co-production: workspacebrussels Weld (Stockholm); Car Wash Theater (Antwerp); Black Box Theater (Oslo) Supported by Jardin d´Europe/Cullberg Ballet; 4Culture (Bucharest), Tanzhaus nrw (Düsserdolf); Tanz Im August/Sommer.bar (Berlin); Danshögskolan, University College of Dance (Stockholm) and the Culture Programme of The European Union.