Mette Ingvartsen: Manual Focus (2003) / a 4.5 workshop response to performance documentation on vimeo. 27.10.2017, PACT Zollverein, Essen.
The bodies and the mask on the face––all three wearing the same––are transforming from an amorph form into an animal. Oh wait!, now I see it: it’s a monkey or a dog!––and back to becoming nothing, a big question mark. A negotiation with the force of gravity, an exaggerated weight of the forms, the leaking body not like water but like a smoothie.
Where does the human start and the object end; what kind of bodies are they and how do I perceive a body and why do I constantly search for the hormonal differences that the genitals create in a body; what is it that I’m watching exactly: a human body containing the young and the old, a freak, a critter––what is the essence of these bodies?
The linearity of the choreography enriches itself with the use of timing––as the Viereinhalb Sätze writer Beatrix Joyce said: the illusion lets us go and grabs us again by the clever use of movement-time patterns, creating a confusion.
Viereinhalb Sätze 