Periodic Périphériques - N°71

Bodys immersed in a crowd of lights

 

Dancer Christel Brink-Przygodda and lighting designer Philippe Veyrunes make their work as plastic artists. They founded the collective K-LI-P to produce installation and performance art, crossed experiences blending their respective worlds, such as the one they're performing at l'Espace Vallès, for the season opening.

 

One composes with lights, the other with her body. Philippe Veyrunes and Christel Brink-Przygodda founded in 2005 the collective K-LI-P (Korpër-Lumière Installation-Performance (“Body-Light Installation-Performance”), a name that sums their program, and of which they make the core (to which other artists can aggregate to depending on projects). Their intention tends to, through shared experiences, to ruffle, rather than mingle, their imagination. Both of them know what they won't do. “I don't position myself in a situation where I'll light a dancer that would try and tell a choreographic story” specifies Philippe Veyrunes. As for Christel Brink-Przygodda, she even considers that what she does isn't pertaining to “dance, but rather a matter of writing a score supported by the concept of performance”.

Both of them work on transforming the physical space, shaping it with light and body, into a mental space saturated with cultural references, with memories, sounds, images and texts. Him, influenced by conceptual and minimal art, builds an installation of fluorescent tubes of which he's remotely controlling the effects, whilst multicasting sounds (among other things, electroacoustic creations by Jérôme Poret), and filmed sequences from different sources. Her, in line with John Cage and Merce Cunningham, inscribes in this moving framework danced actions cut in the rhythm of space, but also video excerpts from the “body journal” she tends to daily.

(…) Held in this set, the spectator moves in a memory flow that surrounds and encompasses him, a circling loop in which images, sounds and body, layer in a grand mix. By its acting presence, the dancer's body changes everything, shattering the virtual reality with its tangible, alive, human reality. Faced with such profusion, the spectator will only get fragmented glimpses, that he chooses an angle of view or stroll before the flood of visual proposals offered to him. For the duo of artists to confess having put “plenty of things to see and live” in this hybrid piece, conceived at the crossing paths of plastic arts and spectacular.

 

Jean-Pierre Chambon