review
“scene r-eco-ver burst our reminiscences with nature, it is a performance not to be missed if you seek to be in contact with the elements and wish to feel yourself as one of them.”
Words by Paula Catalina Riofrío
scene r-eco-ver is a conceptual dance performance, and adapted screen dance for World Stage Design 2022 / Scenofest at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada. Rings, Profit, Falling, Charcoal – those are the stages that trace the narrative of this journey. Inspired by the unviable natural catastrophes in Northern California during 2019, the director and choreographer, Maxine Flasher-Düzgüneş, reconstructs the cycle between the human and the more than human entities that coexist in nature.
Three bodies are breathing in the middle of the bark of a tree. Human movement transcending humanity, humans being moved by transcendence. They expand and re-centre: finding their vertical like the spirals of the tree rings. The heart of nature and the hearts in their chest overlap, breathe together, grow together, and get hurt and invaded by diseases or by unpredictable phenomenon just in the same way. The dancers move through space with a despairing enthusiasm to uncover the barks of the self.
“The dancers move through space with a despairing enthusiasm to uncover the barks of the self.”
Dancer: Sunhi Keller. Music: Michael Wall.
Michael Wall’s melancholic trumpet transforms the atmosphere into the ways of productivism, profitability and alienation. Writing in silence, carving the barks of the trees, two of the dancers lure each other with the trace they mark, Keller reads “the measure of the land, and the measure of our bodies are the same.” Covered in paper-bark she is torn apart, leaving her weak and weightless; the wind encounters her as tender as a whisper and as furious as a storm.
Fire enters the forest, a deviant heatwave of movement. The soil and its populating trees that breathe every page of our existence, are devoured by it, by her. Leaves fall as she swirls, swiftly entwining with air and brushing the fire in and away. Now calm, nearly extinguished, fire whirls the early ashes, to the mesmerizing notes of Fabiano Do Nascimento’s guitar. Flickering her lasts steps, Palmisano leaves our mouths and our senses with the mark of her hissing and ethereal crepitar.
“Covered in paper-bark she is torn apart, leaving her weak and weightless; the wind encounters her as tender as a whisper and as furious as a storm.”
Dancer: Giada Palmisano. Music: Michael Wall. Animation: Jade Lien
Water comes, water goes, and the soil is so thirsty. Swaying her arms, she opens the streams for rivers to flow; drawing canals with her whole. Her movement leaves a smell of petricor, enfolding us all, sinking into water, becoming water. She slides down the wounded barks, she pushes but she pulls the death out of the living. All poetic means are in nature, we are nature. The forest has its dance, and it is between fire and rain.
The new born charcoal sings a song, and words are encrypted in forest wood, in skin. “The planet will do what it chooses, now we’ve set it off,” Pinard says, its resonance encrusted in her skin. Transformed by earth, claiming back our childhood, our innerhood, making us aware of the stability and instability of our planet. Aware of death and disintegration as part of a cycle. scene r-eco-ver burst our reminiscences with nature, it is a performance not to be missed if you seek to be in contact with the elements and wish to feel yourself as one of them.
“All poetic means are in nature, we are nature. The forest has its dance, and it is between fire and rain. ”
Dancer: Lauryn Pinard. Music: Michael Wall