… things that happen to the body,
things that can’t be undone
excerpted from TATEetc > Microtate – reflections on a work from the Tate collection:
| It’s the texture of the skin that summons a number of things. Memory of my grandfather, hooked up to an oxygen cylinder in the front room of the prefab bungalow, Alvaston, near Derby, 1980-something. His hands. Neck. Face. My brother’s hands too, which I always think look older than mine, even though he’s younger. But he’s worked outdoors most of this past twenty years and his hands have lived a different life from mine. Marked. |  John Coplan, Self Portrait Torso, 1974 |
| Weathered, where mine stayed pretty much soft – computer keyboard fingers. Despite that, looking at this detail it’s also my own skin that I think of. The realisation I had at age 21 that this skin is not invulnerable – that it can be damaged, changed, altered forever. That | |
… and move on: an outlook on
Out of Context by Les Ballets C de la B
To start 2010 with some move forward .. what could be better in this context than Alain Platel’s Out of Context, which I already had the luck to see in an excerpt at the Tanzkongress 2009, which took place in Hamburg under the nicely ambiguous title “No Step without Movement!” (see video).
It is certainly a piece worth to be seen – and in no way related to any ‘poor’ crisis concepts or purely ‘hysterical’ expressions – as Alain Platel explained in an interview. It simply was due to an ‘out of context’ situation for his group of dancers, which he feared would drive them apart. Though his intention to hold them together and bridge the time, brought this piece – based on minimal budget – alive:
“I am not referring to hysteria as a disease, but rather as an expression of oversensitivity to life. Whenever words are unable to
