Mette Ingvartsen: Manual Focus (2003) / a 4.5 workshop response to performance documentation on vimeo. 27.10.2017, PACT Zollverein, Essen.
Three bodies, three heads turned around, and skin — so much skin! The limbs (of long, pale, dancerly bodies) shine as they trace invisible geometries, the bones especially, shimmering through the spine, the triangle of the lower back, the hips, bursting and splitting with health and flexibility, while the face, distinguished by its complete skinliness, emits no such light, but is an absorber, of light, of energy, of life. But it is with these backs, loaded with light, that we converse: they move forward and backward, horizontal tos and fros, punctuating themself by inflexions into hips and rests of the floor where they lie glinting like a jewel at the bottom of dark waters. Here we finally understand ourselves animals alongside other species of animals. Here we see ourselves in the chain of things which are impossible to understand in their grotesque and uncanny detail: bodies moving in other ways.