clattering like the beetle…
(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Post No Bills
Dancer Kitt Johnson
Dance chapel. Copenhagen Stage Festival, 2019
A seated collapsed body, wearing a black suit, black mask, black gloves, half human, half insect, now clattering like the beetle moving in zigzag, or sideways, constantly along the ground, tense into a trembling energy, agile, inhuman , cannibal, self-consuming, now crawling across the white earth, this monkey, this human, never the naturalistic forms of the western bodies, but masked, curved, elated bodies, with white eyes, the tragic obscenity of the monkey, now caterpillar-like, electric, distorted, motionless.
Butoh dance, body dance, body art: the theater of distortion.
This small body absorbs space and causes it to tremble more than the outstretched bodies of the western big dance. It is the secret of cruelty: characters, bodies and earth that are interconnected rather than dissolved. Instead of occupying an abstract space, as in Western choreography, the whole room is brought back to the body with the help of a crazy, tormented and never-well-known nudity. The hands are brought up to the face and pull the hair out of the eyelids of the mask, eyes are no longer needed to see. Now standing while hands button up the suit at the abdomen, which first contracts and then plays out, like an inflated bladder, after which the contours of a face, a child, an unborn child, an old child, lie in the folds of the stomach. Death precedes birth, blood does not circulate. For a long time the body remains standing while the child seems to retreat into the stomach, away from us, away from the world.
Bagefter
forlader den stående krop dette rum ad en bagdør i det ene hjørne. Og vi,
tilskuerne, bevæger os tavst, uden applaus, henover det samme gulv, den samme
jord, ud ad den samme bagdør, det rum og den scene, der ikke er mere, hvor der
kun er kroppen, nøgenheden, livet. Butoh-dans, kropsdans, kropskunst:
fordrejningens teater. Post No
Bills er titlen på
dette stykke: ingen at rette din anklage imod, for dine fejltrin, din
ufølsomhed og dumhed. Ingen Gud, ingen syndsforladelse, ingen
ansvarsfralæggelse eller aflad. Ikke engang her mens vi står udenfor
Dansekapellet på Bispebjerg Kirkegård i København.
Art power
Post No Bills is a study of the crisis as a creative transformer. For critical experience is acquired through experiencing crises. Crisis and criticism are mutually exclusive. Crisis and criticism have common root in Greek krinein: to separate, decide, purify. Criticism is the position of reality. With criticism, truth is divorced from false, real from false, and through criticism the individual rises out of the flock and becomes a responsible human being. The crisis is therefore always a break with the past. Which gives you the opportunity to look something deeply into your eyes, namely what life is fundamentally about and what values count.
Post No
Bills is a arte povera, (ital. «poor art») der stammer fra den italienske bevægelse i 1960’erne og
70’ernes Norditalien, hvor kunstnerne, som et led i den politiske opstand,
indtog en radikal position. Med afsæt i kunstkritiker Germano Celatis tanker om kunstens på én gang
skabende og kritiske potentiale skulle kunsten bruges til at udforske og
angribe de etablerede institutioner, magthavere, industri og kultur.
Og Johnsons
teaterkunst kiler sig ind der, hvor fatningen i tiden endegyldigt er tabt, og
det nye ukendte knapt anes. Der er ingen grund til at pakke tingene ind
længere. I oplægget til stykket hedder det: «Når vi ikke længere kan ignorere
det helt fatale i at forveksle ekspansion med udvikling. Når valget står mellem
død eller forandring. […] Lige der møder vi det afblankede illusionsløse
menneske med tomme hænder. Slået hjem. Fri til at genopfinde begyndelsen.»
The body as resistance
For eight years I have followed the Danish dancer and body artist Kitt Johnson (b. 1956), who is trained both in sports and as a choreographer, and self taught solo dancer for 25 years. Since I first watched Johnson's twisted, sculpted and distorted Francis Bacon-like body performance in the play OPERATION, examining man as an operating being caught between culture and nature, I have had the feeling of witnessing something very special.
Johnson combines an intense version of a minimalist body art that seems all the more direct and expressive. The body thinks while it, like another caterpillar, distorted, vulnerable and naked, records its own tableaux. A living painting. Bruegel, Hieronimus Bosch, Bacon. Not the human being who is mastering, speaking and thinking, but something inside the human who comes from somewhere, a deep tenderness.
I Johnsons
spinkle krop bliver svaghed til en styrke, som om hun siger: Verden tænker
gennem mig. Som om vi her får sandheden at vide. Fordi kroppen er det sidste
sted for modstand? Johnson
er maksimalt til stede, og vi kan ikke andet end at også at være det.
Kitt Johnson har
med sit arbejde løftet scenekunsten til et nyt niveau hvor gamle traditioners
kropsbevidsthed (butoh) mødes med mere urbane og rustikke kropseksperimenter
tilsat ømhed og krisebevidsthed.