Depth of Field in Aarhus 2017
L-R: James Vu Anh Pham, Tara Jade Samaya Image: Jeff Busby
Force Field
By Juliana Engberg
In optics, particularly as it relates to film and photography, the term ‘Depth of Field’ refers to the distance between the nearest and farthest objects, in a scene or vista, that appear sharply in focus. The dance piece, Depth of Field – Aarhus Variation, created by choreographer, Anouk van Dijk, and performed by the Chunky Move ensemble, expands upon this optical definition to create a work of immense power and civic metaphor, using space, bodies, light and sound as principle collaborators in a social/spatial and ontological interrogation.
Depth of Field – Aarhus Variation was performed in the urban setting of Officerspladsen, a 19th century quadrangle where, once, parades of military dragoons assembled and trained, creating symmetrically organised, regimented patterns in formations on horseback. Like many of Aarhus' important edifices, the Officerspladsen and its surrounding buildings, Ridehuset and Officersbygningen, were commandeered by the German occupying army in WWII. During these years it was a site where diabolical military orderliness presided. Now a benign plaza of gravel, Officerspladsen, is an urban park settled between the ARoS Art Museum, the Musikskole and the repurposed Ridehuset where festival events, markets and other occasional public activities take place.
Daily, people traverse this space: children going to the music school, visitors to the art museum, civic workers on their way to the iconic Aarhus Town Hall, sundry others. It is simultaneously a busy, habitually used route for people with a designated recurring destination, a quixotically ephemeral site with no specific purpose and a transitional area – a terrain to be negotiated in random acts of travel. It is therefore a social space, but one without a cohesive, constant sociability – a permeable space, open to casual interference and loss of unity.
It is this public aspect that Anouk van Dijk seeks to explore in her work that assembles and disassembles pedestrians, dancers and audience in a choreographed spectacle of optical and physical stretch. In this work, moved from the traditional and protective structure of the theatre or interior dance studio to the porous external environment, van Dijk uses the site to break the 'stage' barrier and allow the dangerous and ephemeral to enter into her zone.
The audience for this performance is seated on bleachers, equipped with personal headphones. Pre-performance classical music is played, interrupted at times by radio static and snippets of spoken word. The ‘stage’ is set, all is quiet and settled and there is a sense of anticipation. For a period of time there appears to be nothing upon which to focus one’s attention so the eye drifts naturally to peripheral activities. The person on a bicycle just off to the left, outside the gravel zone, wearing a fluorescent yellow visibility jacket. A couple far in the top right hand corner of the plaza apparently looking to a further distance, leading the eye to the rooftops beyond the ARoS Museum and the Musikhuset buildings. An elderly woman wandering across the top of the site, carrying large bags – the kind that itinerant people lug between places of rest.
The eye refocuses when a man appears with a red scarf and walks briskly along the right hand edge of the zone, outside its boundary, behind trees. He carries an umbrella, talks on his phone. He is absorbed with his own issues and plays no heed to the audience to his left. A museum visitor, a well-dressed woman in chic red high- heeled shoes, totes an ARoS bag. She’s been out for the day in the city, doing culture, shopping. She seems to be in no great hurry, perhaps she is waiting for someone. A couple of women wheel their bikes across the plaza. Their tinkling laughter enters the ear in a particular way, integrated somehow into the crackling musical soundtrack. People at the end of the plaza mooch about.
L-R: Niharika Senapati, James Vu Anh Pham, Tara Jade Samaya Image: Jeff Busby
A cyclist starts to circle the flag-pole at the far end of the site – this movement is deliberate, a change in tempo has entered the arena. The music has halted, the town hall bells ring – outside or inside the earphones? It’s unclear, slightly confusing. The cyclist rides along the paved edge of the gravel, then suddenly abandons her bike.
Clad in a purple top and dark pants, wearing mirrored sunglasses, she appears to absorb and also radiate a particular light. She runs onto the gravel at full speed and looks at the audience. The performance has begun. Her feet on the gravel are amplified as she scrapes them, mussing the pebbles. All sounds become intense. A second figure enters the scene from the top of the site, running full tilt to join the first performer. Another joins from the side. The trio, a man and two women, move in a roll of choreographic turns. Strong fierce movements, tumbles and sudden halts repeat and repeat; this is a pas de trois, a ménage à trois, a complication of relationships. Their respirations are heard, the sound of deep exhaling and effort.
A woman walks across the top of the site with a cello case strapped to her back. Oblivious to the fact that she has transgressed the ‘stage’. The dancers are blown in an imperceptible wind, their bodies flung back and pulled by an invisible force towards the back of the site as if they were part of a woodcut landscape by Katsushika Hokusai (1) The old woman, now aware of the dance turmoil, and still lugging her bag sits and watches for a while.
The dancers' bodies are ecstatic and spasmodic, pulled, crushed, pummeled by their own efforts which seem relentless and in search of respite but unable to find that rest. They must continue like buffeted matter, attracted and repelled by each other like human magnets. Oh, the man on his phone is back again, still talking, absorbed, carrying an umbrella in case of rain, his red scarf pulls the eye away from the performance. In fact hasn’t he been past a couple of times now? The woman with the shopping bag and red shoes is is still waiting too. The girls with the bikes are wandering through the site again, laughing.
1 Eg. Katsushika Hokusai, Ejiri in Suruga Province (Sunshū Ejiri), c.1830-32, polychrome woodblock print; ink and colour on paper
Tara Jade Samaya Image: Jeff Busby
L-R: James Vu Anh Pham, Niharika Senapati, Tara Jade Samaya Image: Jeff Busby
The dancers fling themselves about. They suddenly sit, they are up again, they fall, they are up again, they are blown, they are upright, they tumble and clutch each other, keep each other tethered to a spot. One of them runs and then falls flat on her face on a rock. The other two continue to wrestle with themselves and the invisible elements and sounds. The first dancer is up now, she runs across the site and then back, pulling one of the other performers by her invisible thread. They run together to the side, they return, the old lady is pulled by the invisible thread, the man at the edge of the scene is pulled by the invisible thread. The couple run again to the other dancer who is magnetically captured in this dance which tacks abruptly from side to side. The woman with the bag, the man with the phone, the girl with the cello, are all now drawn to watch this spectacle, this harsh exhausting dance. The whole site, and all its humans is a shifting zig-zag of movement. All bodies, whether static or in motion, are linked by this un-seeable force field. Suddenly, as if the strings have been sliced, they all fall down.
For some in the audience this is the first moment they realise that the incidental players, who have been twisting their concentration away from the performers in this social urban choreography of intense movement, have been a part of the ensemble all along. An audible ‘aah’ can be heard as the audience exhales – we have been waiting to take a breath from this frantic arrangement of three bodies in unsettled perpetual motion. This synchronised instant is confirmation that the repetitious cycle of humans going about their business has a plotted rhythm, a palette of light and colour that is part of the ornament of the choreography.
L-R: Tara Jade Samaya, James Vu Anh Pham Image: Jeff Busby
Time stills for a moment, and then ‘real life’ begins again. The perpetual repetitions of the day resume, unruffled by the cataclysm of the fall. The dancers return to their scene for a final frantic set of exhausting movements until they are eventually blown away, hurled once more by the imaginary elements to the back of the site to then disappear as if they were only ever a kind of phantasmic apparition.
Artifice and real life; found and plotted choreographies; real and recorded sounds, artificial and natural light; supernatural and ordinary movements; things in front of the eye, to the side and in the distance; the mundane and the extraordinary. Depth of Field penetrated the theatrical fourth wall to create an event that explored the permeable fragility of the social place. Using the natural disintegration of the plaza and its habitual travellers, it became an existential essay on being and nothingness.
A dog and its owner walk across the quadrangle on their evening stroll. Since they did not witness these phantasmic events, nothing appears extraordinary to them. But the sight of an audience sitting intently focused, in front of nothing, causes even the dog to look up at least once at this strange arrangement of humans.
Juliana Engberg, 'Force Field’ from Commissions: European Capital of Culture 2017, edited by Kay Campbell, Aarhus 2017 Foundation, Aarhus, 2017.
Denmark Season
Aarhus 2017 European Capital of Culture
15 – 16 September 2017 (Aarhus)
