Bleu Provisoire was a show premiered in 2001 – Bleu Remix takes it further.

I hold it to be the first really motionless dance piece, and updating it turns it into a veritable manifesto for immobility. The idea is to stay absolutely still for one hour, with the only action being my secretions, which flow in succession and are blue in colour. So it is a journey through the skin. Operating with biomedical procedures is one way of understanding our inner workings, getting beyond the anatomical framework which for the dancer is given and familiar. While listening to my body, its muscles, its skin, I try to add to the notion of the sight of the body. What I am interested in is movement, the idea of movement and ideas capable of conveying a movement. For me everything becomes dance.

A show with no visible drama. Withno narration. With no abstraction. The naked man placed there like a mirror.Raw simplicity. Motionless sculpture. A bloodless flaying of the body. A hallucination of one’s own body is mixed in with biological realities, endlessly confusing madness and concreteness. A choreography of the dance of the blue secretions. Blue, a banal colour and yet one with a rich history, gets us away from the idea of red blood. It produces a different relationship between the body and colour. I work with doctors in order to simulate a mutation of my body through biochemical transformations.

My secretions turn blue. Everything is calculated; I become the subject of experiments.

But poetic experiments with no wish to comment on humanity’s biological future.

The challenge I am taking up is to do a show on motionlessness, trying to prove that it is central, the basis of any movement. I want to smash our way of viewing motionlessness.

Make the motionless body a monochrome vibration that hints at the problem of the relationship between outward immobility and inner mobility. What is going on inside the body ahead of the visible movement. The pre-movement is written down in the body.

My body. A single space, my body. With no affect. With no relation to any other body.

With no plot, facing the audience, just there, offered up with all its complexity and with a biological form of simplicity. Standing stockstill is a trying experience, a task whose difficulty is not quantifiable. The blood flows down into the hands and feet, the blood circulation is poor, you get pins and needles in your arms and legs. It takes the utmost concentration to remain present and not lose yourself in bodily pain. I want to show, not suffering, but the strength that you can draw from your own suffering.

In the context of dance, immobility has never been anything but a posture close to mime and only ever used to colour an intention in a didactic way. The most convincing approach was that of the butoh, although it does not specifically work on immobility but on extremely slow movement. This approach brings man closer to the rhythm of nature.

So it is an attempt to get outside imposed time, something more approaching a natural, almost plant-like rhythm. Here presenting the utter motionlessness of the dancer-man is not provocation, but very much to do with getting back to where it all starts. Presenting the dancer’s body as a live monochrome, as pure vibration, is important. If I wanted to be even more extreme, I could just as easily show a lifeless body, but the crucial element would be missing: presence. Presence and the bubbling mobility of the inner body which are complementary to the image of the motionless body. Performance means a show without playing an accepted part, generally the part of someone else. The artist plays his own part. Art is no longer a representation but a continuous inner state presented before third parties.

Citer cet article

Yann Marussich, « Immobile, Bleu… Remix ! », [Plastik] : In vivo, L’artiste en l’œuvre ? #02 [en ligne], mis en ligne le 18 mai 2011, consulté le 20 avril 2024. URL : https://plastik.univ-paris1.fr/2011/05/18/immobile-bleu-remix/ ISSN 2101-0323