Eline van Ark makes dance not to watch especially

Those who go to a dance performance want to enjoy beautiful movement, expression, movement composition and a beautiful stage setting, wrapped up in music or a soundscape. But there is something, which is always overlooked: the sound of dance itself. Dancer and choreographer Eline van Ark discovered that this forgotten aspect holds great richness and subtle expressiveness. The sound of dance can evoke experiences in us that remain hidden in visible dance. She therefore created the choreography 'The Invisible Dancer', in which no music sounds, the audience sees nothing and a dancer conveys her emotion and physical presence solely through the sounds that her movements produce.

An idea born during an experiment

''This is not an idea that fell into my head and I then started working out,'' says Van Ark. ,,It came about gradually, as the consequence of an experiment. I could hardly have thought of it beforehand, because I am visually oriented. Then you don't easily come up with the idea of eliminating the visual."

The audience is blindfolded at 'The Invisible Dancer'. "I could also have chosen to make the hall dark, but then people start trying to see if they can't see something anyway. Those attempts distract from what my performance is about: what do sounds tell you if you are not engrossed in what you see?"

The long road to this performance began when Van Ark was studying at the ArtEZ Dance Academy in Arnhem. There she made a three-minute presentation, in which the dancers' movements came about by pointing to sounds they heard. These could be the tapping of a theatre lamp, or the coughing or giggling of someone in the audience. Later, Barbara Ebner, a former fellow student, suggested to Van Ark to elaborate on this presentation. That became the performance 'RADAR'.

'RADAR'

,,We chose in 'RADAR' to depict the sounds, to make them visible with movements. That way, people could get through that we were reacting to their sounds and that they could therefore influence the dance, that they could control us. The audience started making sounds actively. At first each one for himself. Gradually there came cooperation, they made it a group process. One person created a rhythm and another created sounds based on it. If someone continued with the same sound for a long time, they could notice that we were no longer following it. Then they had to come up with something new, and thus be creative. With 'RADAR', I wanted to make the audience aware of what is in sound, what you can do with sounds. If someone said something, i.e. uttered words, we reacted to the sound of the words, to the sound, not to the meaning."

Dancing with eyes closed

'RADAR' is performed by Van Ark and her colleague with their eyes closed. ,,When I listened to the audience, I could hear what was going on in them. When you watch your audience during a dance performance, from your position on stage, as a performer, it is often difficult to see how the dance enters them. The way I experience audiences changes when I close my eyes. Sounds told me much more than the image of the audience. Sounds the dancers make also tell a lot. I wanted to share that experience with the audience. That's how 'The Invisible Dancer' was born."

Intuition and feeling

Eline van Ark takes a precise approach. ,,Images you see go through interpretation filters and connect with your consciousness. You think about what you see. This gives you distance. Sound penetrates you much more directly, on a subconscious level, not through the analysing brain, but through intuition. It acts directly on your feelings."

Lightness, humour and subtle nuances

Van Ark therefore put all her feeling into both the audition and the making process. 'The Invisible Dancer' is performed by Aïda Guirro Salinas. ''Seven people came to audition,'' Van Ark explains. ,,So it had to be a blind audition. I listened to their dance and looked for a way of handling sounds that I needed for my choreography. There were three reasons why I chose Aïda: first, she has a lightness in her movements that really attracts me. Secondly, she has a certain humour. This is very important to me. I didn't want to make 'The Invisible Dancer' a heavy thing, not a kind of meditation exercise. And finally, when I gave Aïda an improvisation assignment, she would respond with interesting ideas and let out certain nuances in response to the question 'what can you do with dance if it's only about sound?' Those nuances triggered a lot in me."

A long time of intense collaboration broke out. ,,Altogether we worked on it for 35 days, but not consecutively. One or two days a week, no more. If you work consecutively, you become less open to what the sounds do to you. And I needed the time in between to reflect."

According to Eline, every dance movement can be experienced from different perspectives, such as musicality, space, movement or emotion. During the working process, Eline tried to listen to Aïda Guirro Salinas's movements as purely as possible from one perspective at a time. In this way, she wanted to be able to determine how Aïda could, for example, use her use of space to trigger something in her audience. ,,I gave Aïda movement assignments. That way she could focus her dance on me, or on herself, or on the space around her in general. We didn't agree on when she switched from one focus to another. I wasn't watching. I listened and tested if I could hear what she was focusing on. Usually I succeeded, but sometimes not. That way I could hear what worked."

Work process with people from outside

Eline van Ark invited people from outside to the rehearsals: local residents, dancers and blind/blind people. ,,We asked them to listen to Aïda's dance and say what they experienced with the sounds. Aïda and I ourselves were busy all day listening to the sound of dance and could not judge it as open-mindedly as people fresh from outside. They came here, left their daily lives behind for a while. If someone's thoughts strayed, for example to the errands that still needed to be done that afternoon, I knew a movement was not working well."

Listening experts

Blind people played an important role in this experiment. ''Blind people are listening experts. They are more sensitive, more sensitive to atmosphere than other people. They also sense more purely what someone's intention is. People sometimes tell me after the performance that they can put themselves in blind people's shoes better now, precisely because they relied more on their hearing and feeling to get the dancer's atmosphere and intentions down to them."

It was not Eline's intention to make a performance exclusively for the blind and visually impaired. ,,Then I would do something else, for example a choreography where blind people are allowed to touch the dancers. With 'The Invisible Dancer', I want everyone, blind or sighted, to experience dance by listening and perceiving bodily presence in space in a different way, in a dimension that is not immediately noticed, but which affects us deeply, subconsciously."

 

The Invisible Dancer can be heard:

21 October: private performance for blind and visually impaired children and young people in Bartiméus, Zeist

15 October: performance during the Special Guests Thursday in the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven

28 November in The Hague, at the DanceAble Symposium http://www.holland-dance.com/entry/181/danceable-dansen-zonder-beperking

31 January at Splendor Amsterdam, during an evening called Quiosquen http://splendoramsterdam.com/

Subsequent play dates to follow.