Anne Juren, The Point

In her recent work Pornography: A Trying-Out Anne Juren was reflecting on the terms of “sexuality” and “pornographic gaze”, which can be applied on the representational mechanisms of the theatre. In The Point the attempt is to decentralize this gaze and provoke a creative imaginative space in which the choreography is placed inside the body of the spectator.

The Point is a choreographic trip within a circulating museal environment. It tries to expand the contextual boundaries of the term choreography by proposing an introspective journey through executing the private towards a public body. The piece questions and moves around the idea of the point as the place of pleasure and desire for meaning. While doing that it explores the correspondence of the imaginative potential of language and an actual or a pictured movement.

It engages in different states of physical, sensorial and mental experience; it inspects the thin line between private and public, and attempts to balance inner desires and outer realities by teasing and delighting the limbic system of the audience.

The Point activates different images of the body in using different language approaches. The first layers of the session will be about describing body parts or using specific anatomical terms. This enables the spectator to find connections between different parts of the body, as for instance between the left shoulder blade and the right hip joint, or between the eye muscle and the toes. The language of such a session is factual in order to lead towards awareness in action, as well as towards the ability to make contact simultaneously with one’s own skeleton and muscles, and with the actual environment. This factual terminology could be used as a tool for orientation.

The next layer will be the exploration of the possible sensation within the entire body, its skin, bones, organs, muscles, nerves, secretions and excretions, for being able to dissolve the boundaries between the inner and outer spaces of the body, its structure, its functionality, and its belonging.

The text of The Point proposes a specific way to describe the body and to re-imagine the act of love, the boundaries of the body, and a poetic language. The voice becomes an undefined identity. It triggers the idea that no one is a coherent, self-sustaining element; we are all internally divided and made up of many dissimilar characteristics.

Following the notion of the division and the multiplicity of the subject, the piece deals with different choreographic strategies and body practices related to the text and it experiments within the relation between poetry, writing and choreography. It pro- poses multiple possibilities of addressing the inner and outer environments of the body, creating dysfunctional relations, uncanny images and phantasms. The project is an experimental and process-related event to be shared collectively in which the spectators are entirely involved.

Choreography, Anne Juren / Performance, Varinia Canto Vila, Charlotta Ruth, Elizabeth Ward / Sound and Music Design, Christophe Demarthe / Light Design and technical direction, Bruno Pocheron / Artistic Management, Silke Bake / Coaching Foley Artist, Céline Bernard / Choreography assistance, Sara Lanner

Production Wiener Tanz- und Kunstbewegung / Coproduction ImPulstanz-Vienna International Dance Festival / Supported by Wien Kultur, Buda/Kortrjik, UNIARTS/Stockholm and Toxic Dreams/Vienna / Thanks to Roland Rauschmeier, Martin Juren, Sandra Noeth

Premiere at ImPulsTanz, International Dance Festival, 21er Haus, Vienna, 2015