THE LEAP IS IN THE MIDDLE
a dissertation on Flip Book

The moment dance hold the bodies, bodies freeze the dance

They hold it back, they put it in quiet.

Quiet is not immobility, but the gathering of movement itself; the moment when, resting – not as a standstill but as a lull, a trembling lull- one thing can maximally move itself. It is the place of every movement.

It is the Anassimandro’s Tao we are talking about – the Martin Heidegger beloved one: “Within a silent appetite we call that muster….. the sound of silence”

In Flip Book Boris Charmatz explores contemporary movement and its history.
Taking David Vaughan’s 1997 book Fifty Years, which charts Merce Cunningham’s choreography over 50 years, Charmatz invited different groups of dancers to learn and perform Vaughan’s images.

Flip Book is the absolute quiet, the searched and posed one, accurately devoted.

Bodies are placed as in the literally meaning of throw down.

There is a run-up that preexist the posing, then there is the pose.

A leap.

A following of an untied and tied, artifice and spontaneity.

The untied run donates the tied quiet, maintained, kept as a reminder of what to do, hanging.

This double movement, although in time, results to be important in defining the differences between this actual movement and Cunningham’s, as between both the general one and the photographies whose choreographic poses refers to.

The pose of the bodies is reached during the flight too, the leap remains in the moment of its maximum aperture.

Maybe the pose condenses the movement more than photography does.

The leap is the ring of conjunction between two kind of movements, leading movement into quiet and fastening them in an only dancing gesture.

Into the quiet the body shouts and the history preserve itself.

Every time the movement in Flip Book is moving, comes to be hanged up, or to hang up by himself.

Exactly the performance exists in various versions: 50 ans de danse, performed by former dancers of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Flip Book, performed by professional dancers, and Roman Photo with non-dancers, students and amateurs.

Flip Book was created in 2009, it’s a result of relaxed maturity reached through a long research process. After been performed at Tate Modern inside the event series The Tanks – Art in Action and at MoMa It’ll be perform at Kaserne Basel.

This is your chance to discover where is the leap!

Contribution: Emiliano Aversa

Flip Book
Concept: Boris Charmatz
Performers: Ashley Chen, lenio Kaklea, Olga Dukhovnaya, Christophe Ives, Mani A. Mungai Assistant: Laurent Pichaud
Sound: Pascal Queneau
Light: Yves Godin Lighting
Technology: Nicolas Marc
From 8 to 10 May 2015 at Kaserne Basel
http://www.kaserne-basel.ch