A.S.: I would above all like to highlight the way you worked with the circus performers, Pierre-Maël and Valentino, and how they appropriated the idea of listening. It is not easy to take on board, especially for a generation that tends to connect to sound and music through the idea of dancing to music and listening on a mobile phone.

K.D.: A fundamental point in my work with the apprentices was my experience of zero-gravity. It reveals what you feel inside your body, something that you have never felt before, as the terrestrial gravitational force dominates our bodily sensations, including our space-time sensations, in our interactions with the close environment. This is a fundamental issue for me, and I try to make all of the internal feelings I discovered when dancing in zero-gravity emerge through my writing on ‘earth’. This is an exercise that demands that I listen to my body for sensations that open up new paths to knowledge, that open up new avenues. I try to share this knowledge, that I built with the language of dance, this knowledge-feeling, listening, with the circus apprentices of the Académie Fratellini, to reboot their approach and open them up to other emotional horizons, that I then try to share with the audience in the performance. This listening process is infinite, it is constantly being renewed, hence the title “The Infinite Body”. It is quite new for the apprentices who are trained professionally to systematically concentrate on performing figures, finished forms, like double somersaults. I want to work on the pre-movement, on anticipation.

A.S.: I often watched you working with the apprentices on the idea of bearing. Can you tell us a little more about that?

K.D.: Indeed, I use this idea among others, such as direction, inertia, fluidity, balance point….
The notion of bearing is a common part of the dancer and circus performer’s vocabulary, even though practices can be very diverse behind the traditional working vocabulary. In the circus, in acrobatics, and with the apparatus, bearings are dictated by powerful, hard muscular effectiveness, by the spot on the apparatus that takes our weight as part of the movement. I have been working on this notion of bearing since the start of The Infinite Body, and have managed to foster something that allows the circus dancers to understand, to build within themselves and to appropriate a different way of listening. This requires an inner-listening process, where one is attentive to one’s bearing before producing a movement. It is listening to touch. It is a way of ‘penetrating’ the bearing even deeper before planning the movement. When embodied, this bodily sensation will allow the performer to learn how to resolve the movement, the action while producing the minimum effort for maximum effectiveness. Working on the consciousness of the bearing, means working on the pre-movement, the anticipation of the action.
So, we then go back to the figure pre-learned at the circus, to discover free spaces in the body, as we concentrate on our bearing, that allow the action to be organized in another way, using other paths, in slow motion, for example. The objective is to distribute muscular strength differently, not just concentrate it on the load-bearing body part, but to call on the body as a whole to support the effort and allow for more availability, more ease in creating the movement. The development of this inner listening process creates more availability to open up to the space around us and touch that of the audience. It is exactly at that place where we were able to connect with the potential of the interactive sound environment.

A.S.: Indeed, as the dancers wear MYO armbands that measure the nervous system’s activity, in real time and as such the bodily strength used for load-bearing throughout the entire body; the slightest micromovement by the dancer generates perceptible, musically-composed feedback. The circus performer is then forced to concentrate on both their inner listening process and on listening to the sound environment, through their movements and their variations in speed. This situation is not always easy for the young apprentices, as in general, we dance to music rather than creating it ourselves as we move. This is what Varela refers to as enaction, which is to say, a looped cognitive activity, in permanent interaction between an environment, a milieu, and what we’re feeling.

K.D.: At the beginning, the apprentice thinks they are listening, but they cannot hear anything. They try to rely on what they already know in terms of movement, professional experience, their own technique on the apparatus. Then something happens on a human level, there is a sense of letting go, a moment of trust, an immersion. In order to free up listening, you have to dare to do it, dare to lose something in order to open up to something else; dare to listen to the sound, and to treat it like a material. It is unsettling and at the same time it makes space denser, so that it helps to slow down, which is the opposite of circus culture where you are more likely to be required to perform fast numbers with virtuosity and effectiveness. The space here is densified by the sound and the wealth of its variations. It is like a container, a milieu, that creates a feeling reminiscent of that of dancing in zero gravity, a bodily state detached from falling.

A.S.: Obviously, this process comes with a potential for transforming sensible listening habits. We act on what we hear, and the slightest movement has an equally slight effect on the sound. One of the main challenges of artistic creation comes from transforming situations through bodies moving on the apparatus, presenting the transformations as so many possibilities visually and aurally and then sharing it with a wide audience whose attention and imagination we want to grasp through empathy.

K.D.: With regard to sharing with the audience, we split the presentation into two parts in an attempt at mediation. The audience starts off on front-facing tiered benches (with about 40 places) and settle in to watch a poetic, almost dreamlike performance, with no explanation. We play the first part to the audience for about twenty minutes, then we follow up with an oral presentation by the team that explains the piece from an artistic and experimental angle. We then have a second performance, with a conversation between the audience and the performers. This leads to an exchange, the verbalization of a community expressing its feelings and imagination about the two performances by speaking up individually.

A.S.: There is so much to say about the feedback from the audience as they expressed how the performance touched them in a rich and diverse way, and how the two parts of the performance, the mediation and the dialogue, led to a level of trust, attention and listening for an experimental art that is both container and content, for the construction and sharing of knowledge; knowledge of the body, the collective body, the shared body, the infinite body.

1About the film shown here.

2N.B.: The edit of “Corps infini #3” that we are showing here is a trace, an evocation, barely an archive that presents the style and general aesthetic of the performance. For example, the sound mix is in stereo while the actual performance was immersive, in 3D ambisound with the audience immersed inside a cube of speakers. The shot framing is very wide and does not really render the experience from the spectator’s point of view, as they get to circulate from different points of variation of the circus performers’ micro movements with corresponding sound and visuals. This circulation of attention, visuals and hearing means that the temporality and morphology of the piece is unique to each spectator, and cannot be captured by a fixed camera. The audiovisual archive protocol will have to be designed so as to film the images and mix the sound as close to the project as possible. This point will be refined during future projects. We did not want to present the archive of all of the performance and chose instead just an evocation as the film is not faithful to the actual experience of the performance.