UBS Openings: Saturday Live
Characters, Figures and Signs

Friday 20 February – Saturday 21 February 2009
Xavier Le Roy, Product of Circumstances, 1999
Xavier Le Roy
Product of Circumstances 1999
© Katrin Schoof

We traditionally understand 'saying' and 'doing' as being two kinds of distinct activities: the former being descriptive, the latter, effective. Verbal language is seen as a system of communication in which meaning is created through discrete relations between signifier and signified, whilst gesture (and, often, dance) is typically understood as being 'outside' language, therefore constituting a "pure mediality" (Giorgio Agamben).

Taking the alternately spoken and movement-based form of the choreographic 'lecture-demonstration' as its starting point, this two-day programme brings together contemporary dance, visual art and academic discourse in order to consider the parallel, but often paradoxical, significations at play in the dramaturgy of a communal discussion or performance situation. Despite the diversity of forms -from a personal biography to the semaphore flag signalling system to the study of iconography- bodily 'choreographies' work with and against the factual nature of textual scripts, staging tensions between language and meaning in a deliberately unresolved manner.

This unique cross-disciplinary event features Jérôme Bel, Julien Bismuth, Pablo Bronstein, Bojana Cvejic, Guillaume Désanges, Jean-Pascal Flavien, Martin Hargreaves, Florian Hecker, Jennifer Lacey, Xavier Le Roy, Robert Morris, Tino Sehgal, Marten Spanberg, Catherine Sullivan, and Ian White.

Works by Robert Morris or Ian White reveal the inherently theatrical presence of the body of the lecturer and the entanglement of spoken language and a kind of 'choreography' in the context of such public situations. Our understanding of the relationship between citizenship and subjectivity via the relations between architectural form and ways of moving in public space is brought to the fore in the work of Pablo Bronstein, whilst Julien Bismuth and Jean-Pascal Flavien use the long-distance signaling system of Semaphore - a gestural language designed for communication between ships of different nationalities in the borderless space of the sea – to create a poetic performance event.

Challenging the traditionally mute form of dance, Xavier Leroy brings verbal discourse into the dance theatre in his lecture "Product of Circumstances", a key early piece by the choreographer which renders the traditional distinction between these two different regimes of communication and conceptions of knowledge unsteady. The emphasis on abstract patterns and forms, made visible through the use of shadow play in the lecture by Guillaume Désanges, engages the audience to rethink how meaning is produced in art historical discourse.

Florian Hecker and Jennifer Lacey create a collaborative performance in which the choreographic movements of a postmodern dance piece are translated through Lacey's voice into a set of verbal instructions to be performed by volunteer participants within a hypnotic sound installation. And Tino Sehgal discusses the evolution of his practice - in which his situations formalize verbal and choreographic interaction between interpreters and audience - from an early engagement with contemporary dance.

  Music & Performance