schrit_tmacher justdance! Festival 2024

Video-Impressionen – Aqua Alta – Ink Black

Adrien M & Claire B at the Kerkrade Theatre

By Thomas Linden

A man and a woman. Standing next to each other, you get the impression that they could be a couple. If she puts her hand on his shoulder, this gesture can demonstrate affection but also a claim to ownership. If he shakes her hand off, there seems to be a crisis between them. New meanings open up with every movement. We read a smile or a turn like an imaginary text to sound out their relationship.

Claire Bordainne and Adrien Mondot are actually a couple and at first glance they don’t look like a well-trained dance duo. She wears a kind of loose-fitting denim dress under which a lot can be hidden and he may have a few pounds on his hips despite all his agility. But that makes them all the more credible as a couple. Especially when they bicker about housework and cleaning. The two work under the label Adrien M & Claire B and have their production site in Lyon. A couple with a 30-strong team behind them. Most of them are technicians, but the company also employs graphic designers and musicians. They produce digital art, from stage shows and digitalised worlds of experience on headsets to pop-up picture books. In Kerkrade, they had already unveiled their product range to interested visitors during the course of the day. However, it soon became clear that this beautiful, intelligent play with the gestures of couple life, which seeks its special moments between infatuation and everyday routine, was only the introduction to the actual show.

The two perform on stage as if in a cube between two walls. These surfaces appear as transparent as gauze, on which a visual computer spectacle takes place. The couple discovers a hole in the wall through which water is seeping in. Once this hole has been plugged, a new one appears and soon the water is seeping into the house from all sides. The show is entitled „Aqua Alta – Ink Black“ and refers to the floods that occur in Venice in winter and spring. The water is also constantly rising for the two on stage. The black ink, on the other hand, refers to the graphics that give the story its special look. The water is symbolised by countless small black dots. Bordainne and Mondot are masters of abstraction. In their computer graphics, they create abstract fantasy landscapes that are sometimes generated by an emotion – such as falling in love. Here it is the play with the fluid element that is driven into ever more expansive dimensions. Where at first there was only a trickle, the water level soon rises to the roof. You can imagine such a situation in Venice: The house sinks into the sea. As it tumbles towards the bottom, the stage is flooded across its entire width by small dots, like those we recognise from a snowstorm. As if that wasn’t enough, the story continues among the sea creatures. The main role is now played by a jellyfish with lots of white tentacles.

Sure, that’s impressive. However, you soon ask yourself: What else can you do? This no longer has anything to do with dance. At first you are amazed at how precisely the performers‘ body movements are synchronised with the computer program. In fact, water globules no longer gush out of the hole in the wall when Adrien holds it shut. But at some point, the unleashed programme takes over. Animation rules and the story of the lovers is forgotten. How sluggish do analogue bodies seem compared to the rapidly changing graphic elements? On stage, digital images always triumph over the presence of human bodies. The physiological laws of our perception would have it no other way.

Claire B & Adrien M give us a foretaste of a future with AI, when images have triumphed over bodies. These might be boring times. After all, the outdoing of visual effects leads to a virtuosity that, after initial amazement, lacks the essence of a narrative that has a real purpose. Above all, it lacks that indescribable fascination that bodies of flesh and blood possess, despite all their heaviness and clumsiness, but without which there is no eroticism. It is a relief when Claire Bordainne and Adrien Mondot reappear on stage in the flesh towards the end – but unfortunately far too briefly. Somehow, even in this visual overkill, they have become victims of their own computer art. But is this art, or is it not rather entertainment that is all about the visually overwhelming effect? The audience in Kerkrade was certainly enthusiastic.