RADIO III / ᎦᏬᏂᏍᎩ ᏦᎢ is an indigenous futuristic concert, a beautiful and uncomfortable dance performance and a perverse triangle of shifting power that seeks to be unfaithful to both minimalism and postmodern dance’s claims to so-called “neutrality”. As we live, layer and situate form in our bodies we hurtle through past, present and possible futures.
We invite you into a supportive co-existence, separate but aligned, an anthem for xenophilia, a complicit dream, a consensual prophecy.
Exhilarated by a common interest in minimalism in art and music, we are asking how we can work on the performativity and spatial principles of minimalism while being unfaithful to its recognizable aesthetic and its claim to so-called ‘neutrality’. We are on the lookout for a dance that haunts the recognizable toolbox of abstraction, form, repetition and pattern by making visible what should not be seen. We feel compelled to explore a dance that is vested in expression but not (only) in self-expression. How can we diffuse and displace the expressive and physical dynamics of the dance and music material? Where can we go after the minimalist turn of Yvonne Rainer’s dramatic No Manifesto’s negation of spectacle, virtuosity, image and style other than to Mette Ingvartsen’s subsequent Yes Manifesto’s reformulation of virtuosity? What could be a third? When in a bind, caught in the antagonism of the binary, add a third. We are interested in exploring the poetics and the politics of a third: not to locate and to position this third (do we really need more than left, center and right, beginning, middle and end?!) but to generate a methodology that works on positioning as a verb which entails noticing changing relations without staking ownership on a particular place (conceptual or physical).
We are using the notion of the background (as in background/foreground) as a way to investigate the relations through which things are made visible and invisible. We are looking into the image and function of wallpaper and the (invisibilized) backup singer to help us make dance scores, influence the dynamics of our dancing and music compositions, unison movements and the imprinting of a room with multiple and simultaneous patterns.
The work opened at MAI in Montréal June 3, 2019.
