Between Gestures, a ten-day festival of European contemporary dance and performance, brought Pol Pi’s Ecce (H)omo and Noé Soulier’s Movement on Movement to the Dance Center at Columbia College. Organized by the French Consulate and the Goethe Institute with Chicago cultural partners, Between Gestures presented eight performances engaged with “memory of the gesture and our artistic heritage.” Pol Pi’s and Noé Soulier’s works specifically engaged with the choreographic heritage of Dore Hoyer and William Forsythe, respectively. While deftly recreating the affective gestures of Hoyer’s Afectos Humanos and the instructive gestures of William Forsythe’s “Improvisation Technologies,” Pi and Soulier each wove in monologues that acted on the source materials, transforming them for their own artistic objectives. For Pi, the objective seemed to be an investigation of gender and emotion rooted in his own body, and for Soulier, a pedagogy-as-performance about movement theory.
Pol Pi’s Ecce (H)omo, photo by Pauline-Brun.
In Ecce (H)omo we behold the man, Pol Pi himself, barefoot, sporting a fresh fade, Canadian tuxedo, and acrylic fingernails. Drums and bells accompany the fluttering, fanning movements of his hands, accentuated by the long acrylics. The movements evoke dance traditions such as flamenco and Balinese, filtered through a body that has clearly spent time on the dance floor of a queer club. Though dancing solo, he appears to be focused on an invisible partner. Sometimes, his gaze is out at the audience, transforming us into his partner.
The next sequence incorporates more balletic vocabulary, set to a piano score with insistent flourishes of modernist, machine-like phrases. At times, Pi’s movements are long and full of longing, though often they are interrupted by exaggerated gestures and comedic scampering. The sequence ends with him gazing upward, suggesting the power dynamic of a person desperate to please.
After an extended black-out, we hear the performer’s voice greet us from the darkness. The speech blends personal statements (“It was a very good idea to take a break.”) with quotes from Dore Hoyer, making it unclear if the words are Pi’s or Hoyer’s (“A little confusion never hurt”). We are given some biographical information, and told that the first two sequences were “Vanity” and “Desire,” part of a cycle of five short dances. Then suddenly the music of a TV variety show and bright lights reveal the performer now wearing a mustache and delivering a rapid-fire speech as a manic TV host surrounded by cameras on all sides. As his language breaks down, he commands the lights one by one, “Kaput,” until black-out.
“Hate” follows without a soundtrack, save the rhythmic breath of exertion. Pi stomps downstage with his eyes on the audience, his fixed attention unperturbed by the strobe effect of his hands, taloned fingers spread, rapidly waving in front of his face. “Angst” then continues some of the gestures of “Hate” with greater desperation. Pi covers his face and rolls the length of the stage. His hands shake, then the shaking spreads to the whole body, and he raises his shaking arms pleadingly.
Pi returns to address the audience, earnestly removing his mic. He finishes applying his false beard and mischievously grins before dumping the rest of the makeup down his shirt. He describes how putting on the beard helps him to dance the final sequence, “Love.” Turning away from the audience, he takes off his denim shirt, pulls a black a-shirt from his crotch, and puts it on. “This might seem ridiculous,” he confesses self-consciously, but it helps him to be present, to relax his face and jaw, and to gain a new center of gravity as “so much happens in the pelvis.”
The pelvis is in play throughout: he gyrates, is jerked forward by his hips, and dips in Balinese-inspired lunges. The soundtrack is diegetic: part way through the sequence, he plays the piano accompaniment through the tiny speaker of his phone tucked in his back pocket. The performance ends with his hands becoming swan-like puppets, performing a romantic ballet in miniature.
Noé Soulier in Movement on Movement, photo by Chiara Valle Vallomini.
Noé Soulier introduces his piece Movement on Movement with an analogy and an apology. He compares his performance to that of a man in a tourist group explaining the surrounding beauty to all, including the tour guide. Following through on that analogy, the beauty we observe is choreographic material mined from William Forsythe’s “Improvisation Technologies.” Soulier splits his attention to deliver a wide-ranging and informative lecture, while simultaneously performing Forsythe’s precise, fluid gestures. “Improvisation Technologies” is a video database of techniques for improvising. However, Soulier does not use the material to that end—he uses the movements (including Forsythe’s conversational gestures) to build choreographic sequences.
Soulier is interested in the layering of movement and expression: he talks about dance techniques while dancing, though his movements do not necessarily line up with the techniques he describes. The choreography was made separately from the drafting of the text, neither intended to illustrate the other, though we cannot help drawing meaning while experiencing the two together. He acknowledges this logic, explaining that he is fascinated by combining a series of mechanically-derived motions that hover at the edge of recognizable, affective gesture.
Noé Soulier in Movement on Movement, photo by Chiara Valle Vallomini.
Soulier and Pi’s two works share some essential elements: they are solo pieces comprised of extended quotations of choreographic vocabulary, framed by their direct speeches. Beyond this, they drastically diverge because of how each performer/creator personally relates to the choreography they are recreating.
In the talk back after Ecce (H)omo, Pol Pi spoke about his connection to Dore Hoyer’s Afectos Humanos and the impetus for his work with the material. During his master’s program, a professor prompted the students to work with “something you don’t have the right to inherit.” That reminded him of his earlier fascination with Hoyer’s piece and he pursued the rights to perform it by training for years with Martin Nachbar. Pi is Brazilian and transgender, and through Ecce (H)omo, he explores what it means for him specifically to dance the works of a twentieth-century German woman. Hoyer’s intention for Afectos Humanos, Pi explained, was a portrayal of affects disconnected from gender, essentially human. Pi’s performance of Hoyer’s work is particularly effective and illuminating because it shaped by his bodily experience of gender. He shares this special, embodied knowledge by being fully present as he performs. His nails and beard draw our attention to his body within the gender spectrum. Though blended with Hoyer’s words, Pi’s speech is often vulnerable and reflective on his experience of dancing. Even the title asks the audience to “behold the man” though the word for man is complicated by the punctuation: “(H)omo.”
There are only a few moments in Soulier’s text that are in the first-person. Speaking in the general second-person, Soulier describes the experience of dissociative de-personalization: “It becomes difficult to concentrate on what you are doing because you are observing yourself doing it. Sometimes it happens in very intense situations where you think that you should be affected by the events.” He then moves to the first-person plural, “Often the people around us do not really understand our reaction.” Finally he arrives at a personal statement, “It is something that often happens to me while performing. […] It is like I am observing the situation behind a windowpane.” Later he returns to what sounds like personal reflection to discuss the “violence” of ballet training. He compares ballet to ornamental tree shaping: “I am the gardener and the tree.” There is a pleasure in transforming yourself, he says, but that practice must be “done under someone else’s guidance, which is complicated.” Going silent, he performs a Forsythe sequence with his gaze on his own movements.
When an artist engages deeply with the creation of another artist, going so far as to recreate it, the resulting work is inherently a conversation. Movement on Movement is structured as two simultaneous monologues, Forsythe and Soulier “conversing” by chance overlaps made meaningful in the minds of the audience. Soulier’s personal presence is elusive. This, in a way, is an effective, affectless illustration of the piece’s recurring theme of alienation from the body. Through Ecce (H)omo, Pi uses his embodiment, his affect to stage an illuminating dialogue with Hoyer.
Francis Weiss Rabkin is a playwright. With composer Leslie Allison, they co-founded the performance collective Tight Braid Group to produce political, queer interdisciplinary plays. Their plays have been developed and staged in Philadelphia, Chicago, and in New York at HERE Arts, Dixon Place, Bushwick Starr, the Prelude Festival (selected by Jackie Sibblies Drury), The Brick, and the New York Theatre Workshop. They received residencies at Abrons Art Center, Dixon Place, the Millay Colony, the Drama League of New York, and the Wassaic Project. They were a 2050 Fellow at the New York Theatre Workshop (2016-17) and their work has been recognized by The Kilroys List (honorable mention 2015) and the Playwrights Foundation’s Bay Area Playwrights Festival (semi-finalist 2019).
