Press

Sand in the eyes of the beholder

Look, body, space: the Temps d'Images. Festival at the Tanzhaus NRW focussed on visual culture's blind spots 

… Once again, the music in the Festival's first premiere - “The Corner” by Düsseldorf-based artist collective, Ludica - emanates from next door, as if life were elsewhere. Repeatedly, the door in the wall opens a crack, allowing a beam of light to appear; brashly-cheerful music and a psyched-up Italian voice are heard, applause. However, the door is merely a projection against the grey stage wall. All actions involving the three performers on the stage and the audience end in nothing. Questionnaires are handed out, completed - but not collected. A voice says “What do you feel” a hundred times, but it is not a question. Adjectives such as “happy” and “sweet” plop onto the back wall in old-fashioned, bright advertising lettering. The performers, dressed in black, act busy; nothing happens. An official-looking digital display slowly counts and makes a “ping” noise. The dullness, the emptiness that veils the looseness feels like a kind of blindness. Wanting to go elsewhere but being unable to do so - this is what makes this stage performance tangible in an unsettling way. As a criticism of the stage and visual entertainment medium itself, “The Corner” is systematically unoriginal.

---- Melany Suchy; Süddeutsche Zeitung Feuilleton 30.01.2009


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Ludica. "THE CORNER"
 

We'd all like to be there, right in the center of it all. Because that's where it's all happening: people belting out songs, laughing, living it up. A guitar rings out. A man (he must be a star!) is speaking with an audience that reacts enthusiastically to his every word. You feel as though you are breathing in stage air, steeped in sweat, booze and smoke, as though could see yourself bathing in the blue light of the concert hall among the unsettled masses, hear yourself screaming, the taste of beer on your tongue, adrenaline rushing, emotions swarming, overwhelmed in sound... Nothing is there. We're outside. Sitting quiet as church mice on our seats, an aseptic white space in front of us, adorned with no props. Only as a projection creaks a door open does the noise of a rock concert come through to us. You hear screaming, the music, and then the door slams shut. We don't belong there; we're just eavesdroppers at the door... outsiders.

"The Corner", premiered at the tanzhaus nrw by the Dusseldorf-based group Ludica, is dedicated to the knock-abouts and on-lookers who are indispensible to a society. The outsider: in reality he is usually just invisible. Theory romaniticizes him to be among society's true rebels. Ludica's installation performance does not fall back on this cliché. Outsider: here the term applies to the lotto winner who is cast from the life he once knew, just as it applies to the mass murder with a ski mask over his head or the smoker who follows the "smoking area" sign until it disappears into the unattainable. This is the stuff of Lucia's softly satirical scenes that reflect discrimination's dangerous potential with a great deal of humor and, in doing so, initially make an allusion to the good-tempered audience before stating so outright. Bystanding for the visitors: performers in black combat gear direct the audience with doorman "charm" onto the stage area. They have to bend down and look into a small peephole. And their they see: themselves. The backside of a person crouching to see through a peephole.

The 2001 body founded by choreographer Morgan Nardi and video artist Naoko Tanaka has predominantly represented an enigmatic type of poetry that often makes one feel shut out. In 2007 they met with the now deceased composer Sven Kuntu with whom they developed the concept for "The Corner": an audience interaction gone demonstrative excursion. This paradox actually works. The artists cleverly use humor to skirt the thin line between aggressive repulsion and attraction. At the end, a neon sign informs the patiently waiting audience that the performance has been over for a minute, a nonchalant scram.

--- Nicole Strecker, BALLETTANZ- Juni.09