ELEMENTEN I - Room

ELEMENTEN, A CYCLICAL PROJECT

ELEMENTEN is a project encompassing several creations by Cindy Van Acker. Its title refers to the treatise Elements by the Greek geometer and mathematician Euclid. The thirteen volumes of Elements are a mathematical and geometric treatise organized thematically. The first books focus on plane geometry, while others deal with arithmetic and geometry in space. These volumes include axioms, postulates, and definitions.

Cindy Van Acker draws inspiration from this work in that she uses specific geometric principles to determine the dancers’ trajectories, their positions in space, the notation of the movement, the rhythm of the lighting, and even the set design.

However, this theoretical basis involves only a certain layer of the creation; each creation in the ELEMENTEN cycle has a subtitle that summons the essence of the project.

ELEMENTEN I – Room

ELEMENTEN I – Room, the first section of ELEMENTEN, was created for 16 dancers from the CCN – Ballet de Lorraine in March 2016, in response to a commission by Petter Jacobsson. It is based on composer Alvin Lucier’s legendary piece I am sitting in a room.

“I work a lot around the question of limits. This question is introduced into the creation of ELEMENTEN I – Room more specifically through the radical choice of music. I decided to work on Alvin Lucier’s I am sitting in a room, created in 1996. It consists of a speech spoken by the composer himself that is recorded, repeated and replayed until the natural and resonant frequencies of the room come together, overpowering the concrete sound of the voice and any comprehension of the words.

The focus becomes tautological, as the device of this speech repeated over and over again causes a gradual transformation of the speech itself, which disintegrates until it disappears. Repetition creates a throughline around which perception moves, varying without stopping the ambitus (the curving melodic line) of its intensity, forcing it to become active, to look and see, to listen and hear, to feel and receive.

The limits evoked in this work appear in the shared space between the stage actor and the spectator, respectively the tautological transmitter and the receiver…

In terms of body language, the dialectic of limits lies in my resistance to the dancers’ virtuosity in order to preserve my inner conviction, which places the work at the center of both parts, weighting it with the restraint which allows me to push the dancers beyond their initial capacities, into unfamiliar territory where a real exchange may take place.

The set consists of two elements: a dance floor measuring 8 meters x 8 meters imprinted with an image inspired by the spiral of Ulam, based on prime numbers, and a luminous object whose sources are connected to software that interferes with the intensity of the light in relation to the sound.”

Cindy Van Acker – January 2016

Elementen II – Zaoum, a creation for 7 dancers of the Compagnie Greffe, was premiered at the Arsenic in Lausanne, based on Quando stanno morendo by Luigi Nono, and was co-produced by the Arsenic, the ADC in Geneva and the Théâtre Les Halles in Sierre.

Elementen III – Blazing Wreck is a creation for 11 dancers of the Ballet du Grand Théâtre de Genève for the opening evening of the Journées de la Danse Contemporaine Suisse in Geneva in 2017.