Coherent Confusion and Intentional Accidents: bluemouth inc.’s Dance Marathon

Abstract

To play 'Exquisite Corpse,' one person writes down a question on a piece of paper. That person tells the other people playing to write down an answer to the type of question she is asking, without telling them what the specific question is. For example, Write down an answer to a why Then she reads aloud her question. Everyone else reads his or her answer. For instance: is the longest river in North America? Dance Marathon is an event. During its premiere four-night run at Toronto's Enwave Theatre in February 2009, it happened over a period of between 3.5 and 4.5 hours each evening. Since then it has been staged in Cork, (1) Vancouver, (2) New York, (3) Melbourne, (4) Edinburgh, (5) and London. (6) In 2012 it will return to Toronto as part of Harbourfront Performing Arts' World Stage Festival. do bees do at night? Dance Marathon is a competition. Throughout the course of the evening its audience of approximately 200 participants are systematically eliminated, leaving one couple victorious. time did it start raining? Dance Marathon is an interdisciplinary performance. Partly formed 'characters' move in it, emerging occasionally to tell and play out parts of incomplete 'stories,' before receding again beneath the surface and the flow. did you see when you looked out the window? Dance Marathon is an intermedial experience. A public display of unavoidable intimacy, it is a project inspired by cinema, resonant of reality television, and predicated on contemporary societies' paradoxical fascination with/anxiety about surveillance. Is Dance Marathon a theatre piece with dance marathon elements or a dance marathon with theatrical elements? Both. (In a way, 'Exquisite Corpse' is a metaphor for collective creation.) What are you waiting for? In Dance Marathon, a drum solo sounds like a (good) drum solo. However, in the pervasive intermediality of Dance Marathon a drum solo also speaks, a drum solo does: Me, I believe that when you see someone, you should look at the space around them. Don't watch what their body is doing. Don't look at the way they're moving. What you should be focusing on is the space that is sculpted by their body. I'm serious. Look at it. You should really see a person as a sculpture. No, you should see a person as a sculptor. As someone who sculpts space with their body. What you need to do is imagine the air is clay. Everything is clay. And the person you're watching is a sculpting instrument. Like they're a sculpting tool. Like they're a cutting knife. So. You can tell a lot about someone by the space they carve in space. I'm serious. It's like information they're not even aware of. (7) Projected at dizzying speed on the huge jumbotron that claims one end of the dance hall, electronically regulated by the beat of his bass drum, composer Richard Windeyer's reflections on movement in space sound an anthem and unravel a code (of conduct), warning participants to avoid the obvious, the concrete, the quotidian. Attend, rather, to the peripheral, the virtual, the unexpected. Mistrust your perceptual competence in order to exceed it. bluemouth inc. is a site-specific intermedial performance troupe made up of Stephen O'Connell, Sabrina Reeves, Lucy Simic, Ciara Adams, and Windeyer. It holds split residence in New York City, Toronto, and Montreal and is an intersection of dance, performance art, visual media, electronic music, lyric poetry, and psychological realism. Aggressively collaborative and interdisciplinary in its approach, its material consistently brings both traditional theatrical and event-based performative conventions into problematic and unpredictable collision. One of the defining aspects of this juxtaposition of contradictory orientations--of, on the one hand, establishing a theatrical relationship or 'contract' and, on the other, of instigating performative interaction--is the inevitability of confounded expectations. …