Infini

infinity

… something that is not limited in either number or size …

… for centuries, dancers have counted to 4, 6, or 8, and then started over … in modern choreographies, they may count in more complex ways, combining thirteens and fives … but what would happen if they counted to infinity? … what would happen if, rather than reaching a goal, an end, a measure, a cyclical rhythm, they were counting the way one does when falling asleep, or dying, the way one looks at the stars extinguished by light pollution? … What would be the number if it were to mark abandonment, passage, an infinite metamorphosis? … the number of the search, not the number of determination? …

… the movement of the search and not the movement of determination …

… some numbers are bloody, others intimate, some have specific values: a number may be a date, itself forgotten or legendary, or it may be a measure, minimal or immense … numbers have become codes and data to be collected, mined, stored, sold … in our project, we never stop, time is suspended in this flight … we don’t stop at 1989, we don’t stop at 2000, we don’t stop at 2015, 2016, 2017, 2019 …

… the body seems “finite” … and yet human motion is above all a potential … knowing how to do this or that, with this or that body, yes, indeed; however, power is also, and above all, the power not to do, the power to let oneself be moved … it is obvious that they can jump, but they also have the choice of not doing so … true power is having the choice (not) to act?! … they run, but when they run they are already straining toward the end point, they are already there at the target, they are already upstream and downstream of this gesture of running … we can search for infinity in the past, by endlessly going backward, we can search ahead of us, we can also delve into the present, by looking at what is contained between 0 and 1, between now and now …

… right now I fantasize a lot about the open space and public spaces … one of the things that keeps me tied to the architecture of theaters is that the stage-cum-auditorium is like an enormous head, with the brain on one end and the tongue-mouth-jaw-palate on the other. Decide for yourselves if the brain is the hall or the stage-set! And whether the space of chewing, the tubes that enable flow, and the raw nerves form the stage or the seats in the auditorium. One arrives as a group, and yet finds oneself alone, often in the dark. One is “deep in thought,” and in the thoughts of others, those who act and dance and those who are seated next to us. Now, what is limitless to me is precisely this sort of abstract head. There are mathematical infinities, there is the interstellar space, there is humanity lost in (so-called) nature … we should somehow also find some sort of infinity in sleep or in love relationships, if we only look close enough … but it’s as if all these notions of the infinite were a way for humans to trigger our narrow conception of the world. Infinity becomes a non-sacred way of touching what is beyond us … and the theater is one of the loci of thought that makes this divide possible.

… I’ve always hated counting while dancing … I’ve always preferred letting my mind wander … in this piece, we count, speak and sing, and dance, but it’s only so that we can wander better …

… no (en)closure, endless opulence …

…

Notes of intent - Boris Charmatz, January 2018