What happens when a dance performance is built as an experience instead of as a language object? How many times, while watching a performance, we wished we could step in? How many times we got so bored (often due to the lack of meaning) we were tempted to leave the theatre, or at least to express our dissent? And how many times while watching movement we felt like dancing, to experience what we were seeing also with our other senses?
But the social habitus fences us in the audience seat, and routes us into subsequent complicated circuits of post-performance speculations, in which we debate about the type of performance, the audience types and the situations in which the work has been programmed. These power relationships mirror similar but even more complex balances of power that are present in everyday life.
I would like to question the nature of the performative device, by going through it together with the audience with a different vision, in which the focus is not on the interpretation of a symbol but on the sharing of an experience. We created small mechanisms, that are sly “traps” in which the audience is guided by the two performers. These small devices are conceived in such a way that the spectators must intervene, in order for the dramaturgy to carry on, interrupting of modifying the development of the current scene. In order to do this, we have designed a progressive evolution along which, little by little, the audience is guided into an environment of trust, sharing, empathy, establishing the perfect terrain for always more dramatic and invasive interventions. The aesthetics flirt with the cult movie “A clockwork orange”. The orange, the milk, the colour white, the artist's sado-masochistic relationship with the performing arts system and with the audience: these are the underlying elements to the unfolding experiments. And perhaps, by analysing “the mirror”, we can understand better what is the image we are talking about.
Enrico Pastore - www.enricopastore.com – 4/12/2017
“[...] an extremely intelligent and sharp show, that presents dance not as an object to admire, but rather as an experience that questions patterns of thought through the movement of the body, with a philosophical approach."
Simona Frigerio - Persinasala – 14/12/2017
“... Marco Chenevier is an author who is able to create performances that combine dance, theatre and interaction with the audience, together with an interesting anthropological research [...]. In this case, Chenevier investigates into our capacity to accept violence and, for two thirds of the show, he does it with great self-irony, rhythm and a series of mechanisms that imply both the participation of the audience (being it egotistical or not, since there is some real money to be won) and dance performances [...] that put the audience itself before a choice.”
