ACTOR #1 [2010]
Première 14 > 16/01/2010 - Kaaistudio's, Brussels (B)
The artist and theatre-maker Kris Verdonck quite often combines his fascination with machines with images and concepts that owe a lot to science fiction. This certainly applies to the three-part Actor #1.
The first part, called Mass, shows an odd, poetic landscape in which chemical and physical processes are taking place. A landscape of constantly moving sculpted mists.
SYNCOPE [2009]
The body of a giant floats on the water, his face turned down. It moves slightly, but whether the movement is the result of his breathing or of the water rippling it's hard to tell. The image is ambiguous: dead as well as alive, both serene and billowed, blissful or perhaps dead drunk. Who is he? Who has dumped him here?
DUMP [2009]
DUMP is a video projection that talks about the overall malaise in the business world.
DANCER #2 [2009]
The combustion engine, or its use, is one of the main guilty parties in the climate crisis. Kris Verdonck shows the engine in its naked reality and seeks out a confrontation between the ethical and the aesthetic.
D'OR [2008]
His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet...
END [2008]
In END, the performance artist Kris Verdonck shows the possible final stages of a human society in ten scenes. Melting glaciers, burning forests, cities under water, ubiquitous screens and cameras spying on us, the uncontrolled availability of weapons of mass destruction, and so on.....
I/II/III/IIII [2007]
I/II/III/IIII is a new theatrical installation by the performance artist Kris Verdonck. Four ‘identical’ female dancers hang like marionettes in a huge ‘machine’. Together with them performance artist Kris Verdonck generated a passage of choreography: a solo, a duet, a trio and a pas de quatre. They sought the greatest possible freedom from the machine, but sooner or later it sent them in the direction it decided upon.
STILLS [2006]
The Stills consist of gigantic projections: naked, voluminous human figures, imprisoned in a space which is much too small for them. They sometimes move slightly, seeking the most comfortable position in which to bear their uncertain situation. Still I & II was commissioned in September 2006 by La Notte Bianca in Rome. The pictures were projected onto one of the megalomaniac façades of the EUR, a suburb of Rome built by Mussolini. Despite their magnitude, the precarious position in which these naked, utterly fragile figures find themselves was in stark contrast to the self-assured, social-realist architecture. A similarly imposing and demagogically tainted location was sought - and found - in Brussels: the upper part of the Kunstberg.
Box is an installation: a cube of glass contains the strongest possible light source that can be concentrated on such a small surface. The project was developed in collaboration with engineers of Philips Lightning (Turnhout). The spectators are given protecting dark glasses and are led into the room. While they watch the light, they hear the voice of actor Johan Leysen, reading apocalyptical texts from Heiner Müller's Verkommenes Ufer and Landschaft mit Argonauten , in German. The light, that normally enables us to see, now makes us blind. It could be the flash of an nuclear explosion, an incessant, dazzling lightning, announcing the end of the world.
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MAN [2005]
Man is a performance: a dancer is wearing some kind of helmet on his head, making it impossible for him to receive any visual impression. A small camera has been mounted on top of the helmet. Through a digital system called The vOICe , this man hears an incessant flow of sounds. The vOICe was developed by Dutch engineers to let blind people see. The visual impulses, registered by the camera, are converted into auditive data. The man has to decode these auditive data in order to move forward in the world. His "sensory deprivation" turns into a "nearly drowning" in an excessive quantity of unknown impulses in which he literally has to find his way.
RAIN [2005]
Rain is an installation. At irregular intervals, burning drops fall down from some twenty points in the ceiling of the space. They seem like little, blue lamps or glow-worms that fall down and extinguish. Just like in Box , this rain of fire refers to the image of the Apocalypse, where the world is put out of joint and "unheimliche" phenomena occur which man no longer has a grip on.
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DUET [2005]
in Duet , two dancers hang in the air, attached to some kind of grab crane. The machine makes slow rotating movements. Due to the way how the man and the woman are attached to the machine, they have to embrace, support, help each other like two dancers in a classical pas de deux. Due to the rotation of the machine, the effect of gravity on the two bodies is subject to constant changes. The two human beings are attached to each other and depend on the machine to stay in balance. .
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PATENT HUMAN ENERGY [2005]
In Patent Human Energy , a woman is lying on her back on a bed with long, iron bars, like a fakir. Above her, there are more bars. At the top ends of the bars, at the point where they touch the body, small microphones have been installed. They register all the signals (sound, temperature,...) emitted by the body, and translate them into impulses that we, the spectators, can perceive with our senses. The title Patent Human Energy refers to the patent with the same name that was registered by the American company Microsoft in June 2004. Microsoft patented a method with corresponding devices, all developed by them, to use the force and the impulses of the human body as some sort of keyboard through which certain devices, e.g. a cell phone or a watch, can obtain energy.
In Heart a woman is hurled against a wall after every 500 beats of her
heart by means of a cable attached to her body. Her heartbeats are
audible to the spectators. Because of the stress situation the woman is
in, it is of course impossible for her to control her heartbeats: she
cannot but surrender to the machine of her own heart, to the
unpredictable, sublime moment when the cable is tugged and she is
thrown against the wall, again and again.
DANCER #1 [2003]
A grinding wheel with a big steel L hangs from the ceiling. When the disc starts to turn, the L twirls round uncontrolled. The motor races but still tries to find its equilibrium, still tries to function despite the strangeness of the situation. However the machine does not succeed. It starts to take on the appearance of a classical hero in distress, with movement making the situation become more and more unbearable.
IN [2003]
An actress remains motionless for an hour in a display window filled with water. The distortion to her senses caused by the environment she is in makes her go into a trance. The sounds of her breathing and movement are amplified by microphones.
