Blink

"Here I am in the presence of images, in the vaguest sense of the word, images perceived when my senses are opened to them, unperceived when they are closed."

Henri Bergson in Matter and memory

This creation is a part of Running times, a cycle of works based on the theme of time that I initiated in 2007 with different forms and formats:
Road Along Untitled Moments (2007), a performance created in Bologna Xing/Raum (I), Blink (2008) commissioned by ZPA in Zagreb (HR), One shared (dreamed) object (working title) - a French/German production in 2009, to name but a few projects in this cycle.

The originality of Running times is to react to the ever-changing geographical contexts, in the logic of exchange and collaboration.
Blink was created in seven weeks, which is a relatively short period, but which we accepted as a challenge.
It will be the mirror of the meeting between our own work and the performers of the Zagreb Dance Company whom we never worked with before.
I started from the concept of image taken from the first chapter of Matter and Memory of Henri Bergson, and tried to activate and materialize the definition of these images in the framework of the theatre space. For Bergson, image equals movement equals matter.

I focused my attention on the invention of simple actions that are possible to execute in a theatre, using props that we found in situ during our residency in ZeKaeM.

"Actions should be the starting point" is a sentence that was our starting point.
Plus, the fact that all these actions are happening at the same time rather than one after another was an issue for me.
It was a way to approach this strange and theoretical universe of images of Bergson and to feel the continuous flux of time, in other words: the duration.
Blink or - opening and closing the eyes - engages a specific behavior and perception from the dancers to the audience and vice versa.
Martine Pisani

Blink is a choreographic essay taking as its subject any kind of movement in relation to a question of time.
Starting from Bergson's idea that movement and time could be seen and experienced, but never represented, the image of the body was central to us: we tried to raise questions of its presence in the space, its transformation, its connection with the objects and other bodies, or its staying mute, quiet as objects are...
In Blink, we attempted to put the viewer in the position of the eye of a camera. Through the performance, we are trying to reassess the wievers’ idea of the body being presented and offered in front of their eyes through the multiplication of the everyday, simple movements.
Blink places the reality of the movement outside the body: by doing that we are emphasizing the body’s possibility to move, to be looked at, to exhaust its gesture or to simply disappear.
The movement procedure is extremely simplified but its multiplication and its illogic passage from one dancer to another makes us think about its meaning, about dancers’ tasks or leaves us simply experiencing the passage of time.
The inability to identify the logic of the actions affirms the potentiality of the body’s transformations. Yet, it changes our idea of the space and the time of the performance. The choreographic procedure is marked by the simultaneous concourse of gestures, the result of which points to the subtle transformations of our perception: we are moving out from our habitual perception, pushing ourselves forward, towards the space of dreams and our visions.
Saša Božić

Innovation was at the first perceived as the mistake
Blink, choreographed by Martine Pisani, performed by the Zagreb Dance Company in ZeKaeM
Watching the performers of the Zagreb Dance Company, we have the impression that it is much easier for them to create a show which demonstrates their formal virtuosity, than to create a work whish questions the conventionality of the well known choreographic fashions.

In its latest production, the guest from France, Martine Pisani, tried the opposite - to untie the loops of the known sequences of movement and un-teach the Zagreb Dance Company from the things they learn or already know and in which they feel secure and crafted, at the same time encouraging them to try to find a little poetic mess in every gesture they are using. Why do we need chaos, incompleteness, mistake, dissonance? Because the art itself is basically connected with the unpredictability and random inventions, and not only with the army drill.
 

The liberation of the objects from their immobility
The starting point for this creation, according to the booklet, was the Bergson's book Matter and Memory (1896). Even though neither the choreographer, nor the dramaturge Saša Božić are not going in the detail discuss on Bergson, stating him only as an inspiration source, let us remark that Bergson is a philosopher who, in the above mentioned book, wrote that he "equally believes in the reality of the objects and in the reality of the spirit", trying to delete the division between those terms and parallely describing the perception as a specific means of selecting, even impoverishing of the plenitude of images and sensations. It is important to mention Bergson's approval of the intuition, in a sense of irrational knowledge which cannot be subdued to any logic or reasonable classification.

Watching the Blink, we can really experience authors' deep understanding of Bergson, especially the realization of his famous question: "In short, let's try to connect the objects of our everyday existence, and then to liberate them from their immobility and relinquish them to the vibrations of the movement. "The dancers are entering the stage from all sides, bringing with them different props (from the theater fund), they are trying them, trying to change their purpose (to drape an old nylon rug as a fur, to make heroic poses on the little wooden skate, to see a paddle in a long stick, to paint on the floor with the cleaning broom, etc.) or they are simply trying simply to roll the chosen props in their own way, using a lots of jumps on one or both legs, addressing the audience by eventful blinking towards them.
 

Draining the sponge
The problems arrive when those founded objects appear more lively then the performers: the small rolling stairways acts more autonomously than Andreja Široki, who is absently smiling at the audience, not really knowing what she could do with the liberty of the performing choices. Some of the dancers are offering more interesting solutions of making the Matter alive, for example Darija Doždor (washing the stage, sunbathing on the long black curtain), Marko Jastrevski (with his rope), Maja Marjančić (talking with the garbage can) or Zrinka Lukčec (refusing to accept the task of cleaning the floor as only the task of cleaning). But, all these performers are communicating such an amount of ease that it starts to exist as the performative signature of the whole show. The best are Sara Barbieri and Ognjen Vučinić, both of them releasing the threads of their own playfulness, and performing gracefully the duo of draining the sponge and then fast, synchronized, hedonistic travel of hands and foam trough the surface of the stage.

The search for the possibilities which one little blink allows (blink as turning the attention from the world to the self) showed itself as a methodology of the creativity that the performers are afraid of, as they are afraid of any authoring statement, but at the same time they are passionately drawn to it. It is a real pity that Martine Pisani got the chance to work on only one production in Croatia: her ability to point out the awkwardness and misunderstandings as gates from the all known bases of movements and theories, her courage to hug the mistake as the methodology of the artistic invention should be therapeutically prescribed to the Croatian theater.
Nataša Govedić, Novi list

Slowing down the time and liberating the senses
Zagreb dance company and Compagnie Martine Pisani: Blink, concept and choreography Martine Pisani
After two performances of her dance piece Sans at the two, besides Contemporary Dance Week, most significant dance festivals in Croatia: Dance and Non-Verbal Theatre Festival Svetvincenat and Platforme of the Young Choreographers, Martine Pisani has created a new performance with Croatian dancers in the production of Zagreb Dance Company. The company is in this way returning to the collaboration with foreign choreographers, after the successful performance created by the company's artistic director. Blink had its opening night on the 9th of November, after only 7 weeks of rehearsals, which was enough time for Miss Pisani to experience not so bright subtenant's conditions in which the Croatian dance community is existing on the daily basis.

The viewers who had the opportunity to watch Sans, could recognize the unique signature of Martine Pisani: stage completely empty of any kind of decor or overly designed lights ( Aleksandar Čavlek), the certain minimalism of the sound ( Damir Šimunović), everyday comfortable clothes ( Emina Tataragic) in the style of Judson's sneakers , all of which comes from the choreographer's experience of collaborating with the heroes of the contemporary dance, such as Yvonne Rainer or David Gordon, the co-founders of the so-called walking dance. The work of Pisani in Croatia is a part of the cycle Running Times, which started last year and is being realized in different geographical context but with one single preoccupation: the issue of time.

Blink doesn't have any visible development of its internal structure, it consists of the chain of apparently accidental situations created by the encounters of dancers with the numerous objects that surround them. In fact, the performance starts with the performers rushing around the stage, entering through all possible doors, bringing to the bare space a pile of different objects, thus creating the mass of movable scenery that serves as the basic impulse for the future development of the performance. Except the very beginning, the only aloof part of the performance is a that when one of the performers tries to verbally describe what are we going to see and what changes have been brought into the creation, thus demonstrating the impossibility of verbal representation of movement and time.

All that happens after this is one long scene in which the performers try to play with the mass of objects, from the movable stairs, garbage can, the remains of the scenery from another performance, pillows, broom, rope... They even succeed to wash the whole stage with the cleaning supplies. Every performer exhausts in full the object that gives him/her the specific frame of movement. Through their repetition, modifications and tiny changes, these movements change our perception of the objects used or the meaning which we attach to them at first sight. All the actions on the stage are simultaneous, and the action of one performer often serves as an impulse for the whole wave which connects other performers and results in numerous exciting situations in which particularly apt are Sara Barbieri and Marko Jastrevski. Other performers are Darija Doždor, Zrinka Lukčec, Maja Marjančić, Andreja Široki and Ognjen Vučinić. The title of the performance has been inspired by the basic repetitious motive; strongly accentuated blinking of the performers, the purpose of which is to point out the very act of the passage of time. The dramaturge of the performance is Saša Božić.

For this performance, Pisani has been inspired by the French philosopher Henri Bergson and his book Matter and Memory, in which he uses the term of an image and tries to explain how we can experience the essence of some Matter, avoiding the rational and including the intuition. According to Bergson, the Matter decreases itself around countless vibrations, traveling in all directions, like a quiver. We are closest to the understanding of the Matter when we are in connection with its constant move, because every fixation of an image means its decay. That kind of perception Bergson calls the necessary poverty. It is this very minimal, but continuous movement that Pisani offers in her Blink that makes this piece so successful in slowing down of time, and on the other hand enables the audience to liberate their senses, which opens a gate to a new dimension.
Jelena Mihelčić, KULISA.eu, Novemeber 11, 2008

All in order to create an image in the blink of an eye
Prominent guest from France, Miss Martine Pisani created her choreographical essay Blink in 7 weeks.
Zagreb - In our country, the existence of a theater as the co-producer of a non-institutional production, usually means that it is hard to get the terms for the rehearsals.
The same happened to Miss Pisani, who worked with the dancers of Zagreb Dance Company within the frame of "subjective and objective" circumstances in ZeKaeM. It will obviously be hard with the repeat performances, because no one knows when they will be, after the yesterday's opening night.
But, it happened that the source of inspiration can be even the heartless cleaning ladies, who want to do their job, not caring that those non-institutional have their rehearsals.
The experienced Pisani used those circumstances to her own advantage, since the concept of time is one of the essential constructing elements of her ambitious cycle entitled "Running times", of which her work with Zagreb Dance Company is a part.

"Blink" is inspired by the work of philosopher Henri Bergson, who, through the analysis of perception and memory, describes the relation between the body and the mind. This is where Martine Pisani joins him with her associates, the assistant Theo Kooijman and the dramaturge Saša Božić. In "Blink", the action, no matter how banal and repetitive, creates the experience of duration and articulates the unity of the body and the soul.
Those of us who had the chance to watch Sans by the same author, could expect the lack of the narrative element and music, the subtle sounds (created by D. Šimunović), costumes in the form of everyday clothes (E. Tataragić), and the empty stage. In Blink, the performers use the props they find in the theater, on the spot (garbage can, broom, chair, cartoon box) and play with them in Pisani's unique choreographic style which is characterized by the seemingly everyday movements without any imposed atractivity or virtuosity.

It was interesting to see how the dancers of the Zagreb Dance Company and few others chosen at the audition (O. Vučinić, Z. Lukčec, A. Široki S. Barbieri D. Doždor, M. Jastrevski, M. Marjančić) managed in for them completely new roles of clumsy characters, obsessed with meaningless parallel actions in the seemingly chaotic structure of silly walking, caricature gestures, and opening and closing eyes in front of the audience. And all of that in order to create an image in the blink of an eye.
Zrinka Radić