REGARDS SUR LA TABLE VERTE

This project is an extension of Olga de Soto’s research and creation work which examines and finds its sources in Kurt Jooss’s The Green Table (1932) by studying its history, and transmission and impact, both at the time of its creation and since.

The initial project of the choreographer revisits Jooss’s work in two steps. The first, An Introduction, is a documentary performance in which she explores the history of The Green Table. In the second, Débords / Reflections on The Green Table, she invites six dancers to respond to the testimonials she has collected over the years, harvesting the traces that the work left behind, not only among those who saw it performed at different moments of history and in different countries but also among the several generations of dancers who performed the roles of The Death and The Partisan.

The documentation's density and the multiplicity of subjects evoked in the interviews push the author to imagine a form that allows the deployment of the material's richness in all its density, imagining another relation with space and time.

The installation of Olga de Soto stages different aspects of her research on Jooss’ work: its socio-political message and the subjects it addresses, the link with history, the relationship with time, the evolution of vision over time, memory as a flexible and shifting material, the phenomena of identification – observing how personal history and collective history mingle –, the several charges the work contains (social, political, aesthetical, emotional) as well as their impact according to the numerous contexts in which it was viewed and transmitted. She also gives way to the power of voice and emotion, memory and individual gesture. 

Installation presented as part of the collective exhibition Un temps sur mesure, bringing together works by Esther Ferrer, Olga Mesa and Francisco Ruiz de Infante, La Ribot and Olga de Soto, and composed of three works

Premiers souvenirs
2012 - 2014
HDV, projection on a white wall
18'
Testimonials (in order of appearance): Juan Allende Blin, Joan Jara, Jacqueline Challet-Haas, Edith del Campo, Hanns Stein, Toer van Schayk, Marina Grut, Jeanette Vondersaar, Christian Holder

Tentative de restitution d'une danse macabre
2012-2014
HDV, projection on a white wall
33'02"
Testimonials (in order of appearance):Christian Holder, Joan Jara, Nora Salvo, Jeanne Brabants, Michelle Nadal, Ann Hutchinson Guest, Andras Uthoff, Philip Lansdale, Marina Grut, Hanns Stein, Juan Allende Blin, Toer van Schayk, Gerd Zacher, Jeanette Vondersaar, Bruno Jacquin, Fernando García

1932-2010
2010
85'
HDV, projection on a white wall

direction, documentation, interviews, camera and sound
Olga de Soto
video editing Julien Contreau et Olga de Soto
sound mix Mathieu Farnarier

This installation has been presented as part of Un temps sur mesure, a collective exhibtion organised at the Villa Bernasconi in Lancy (Geneva), from February 5 to March 23, 2014.

© Dylan Perrenoud