“ Brutalis “ (L’Humanité) mars 2003
L’Humanité
11 mars 2003 – Cultures
(Excerpt)
Dance. The twelfth edition of the Biennale du Val-de-Marne, keeps going till the 3dt of Aprilthroughout the entire department.
One gets out of the frame and the other takes his foot
Karine Ponties approaches her anatomy from a dry point of view, inside a lighting effect that cuts her body like a sculpture artist digging in the stone.
The twelfth Biennale nationale du Val-de-Marne animated by Michel Caserta is presenting a bill of more than twenty companies’ in as many theatres as companies can this department welcome to. With “Brutalis” The Belgium Karine Ponties sets a hybrid work. The paintings-drawings of Thierry Van Hasselt (plastic designer and artist) are at the same level as the dance. The choreographer lends her own dry and knotted like anatomy for this experience. The show starts on a small and reduced kind of tissue located between the legs of the dancer from which the rest of her silhouette is being protected by a pitch-dark ambience. Our eyes have to accommodate and get used to this all the time. The body of the dancer seems like the object used for the drawing designer. Everything is used in a game between the dancer and the painter in a perpetual dialectic movement. The light arrives to her like a raw look getting to the point of having the impression she is being devoiced of her flesh and bones by it, so subtle and well acquainted that it seems she becomes after all only a skeleton. But in thisinked pitch like darkness, a head, a hand one foot survives. This is a body treated like a sculpture, finely designed.And then under a single light boll the silhouette becomespart of the design of a group of threes being painted at dawn; the arm being raised like a small thin three branch, her breasts liketiny slopes. Devoiced of sensibility Karine Ponties gets down to the floor inside a monumental frame installed there, flattering herself down she getsinside the picture; but didn’t she just get out of it? She becomes a living portrait, making up the ground material, like producing the earth, the soil where she is in a where she comes from. Suddenly the real woman appears, the portrait disappearsmeanwhile Karine Ponties comes out in a black night dress, she has not stopped to surprise us, what is she up to now, is she going to do a strip-tease. She stumbles smoothly, displacing her hips voluntarily…she is not pretending to be funny but working in between the both sides ofthe character, the surprise, the sensuality all that being taken away suddenly by a simple hand movement. She is taking pleasure in posing like this getting to the limit of nearly being grotesque, not afraid of using and playing with her angular body structure. She disguises with great care all possible sentimentalist expression. At the end she gets back into her shoes from which some left soil comes out.
(Translated by Jordi Granados)