Pixel It is one of those works that those of us who are more familiar with seeing theater and contemporary dance can become disoriented or even somewhat skeptical. I say this more than anything, because I suspect that This creation responds to the logic of urban and circus dances, than those of the aforementioned disciplines. Which leads us to carry out the exercise of evaluating what has been represented, from the place where the members of the Center Chorégraphique National de Créteil et du Val-de-Marne / Compagnie Käfig/Mourad Merzouki departed. That is to say: In this piece, the how prevails more than the what was done.
Thus, a series of scenarios were elegantly linked to us in which the possibilities of bring into dialogue the use of new technologies with the interpretations of the professionals at stake. Therefore, it seemed that their movements triggered “reactions” from the projections, or else made sure that they were submerged in a framework in which digital reality and our daily lives have come to intermingle. Of course, this brought to light images that would have little to envy to the special effects of the cinema, as well as what can be collected after exhaustive and thoughtful work with means typical of a great stage production.
Photo: Laurent Philippe
The above are part of the things that make me affirm that Pixel It is a good example to get started in contemporary performing arts, as long as you’re not used to going to the theater, but feel you want to go beyond the more conventional formats of B-Boys/B-Girls shows and circus stunts. Likewise, it situates those of us who are the most regular spectators of contemporary performing arts, in a context in which we have to test our criteria when it comes to confronting that tension that exists between a piece of artistic/conceptual quality, and what it may be more effective in attracting more audiences to theaters.
I don’t want to feed with it the pernicious dilemma between making and promoting “quality” productions, versus investing our efforts in “commercial”. Rather, what it is about is to focus on finding strategies that transcend creating an audience, it does not have to go through generating an endless number of genres, which in one way or another, make us see followers of disciplines other than ours as alterity, not as people who, at a given moment, can enrich us. In such a way, that the multidisciplinarity that so characterizes these times, could be developed in less unequal ways, without this taking away the free evolution of each of the registers that are coexisting today.
Photo: Agathe Poupeney
I know that what I am saying “sounds good” on a theoretical level, but in its application one is faced with a series of variables that few of us are prepared to overcome. At the end of the day, all this leads us once again to the fact that asking ourselves new questions means placing ourselves in different terrains from those in which we usually operate, and this would only be one more starting point. What is behind all this? Seriously, does encouraging more mature and well-versed creations and viewers necessarily imply instructing on issues classified as “high culture” or “alternative culture”? Or, on the contrary, works that are carried out with “more spectacular” registers (so to speak), only have the task of “entertaining” and making the spectators “have a good time”, without much pretense?
I have the feeling that this type of question corresponds to a dynamic in which more walls are raised than joints. I insist, and all this at a time when multidisciplinarity is more “unleashed” than ever. Is it possible that the pace of creations and the tastes of viewers are going much faster than our abilities to understand and assimilate, to a reality that is more present than “something to come”? If this is true, Doing philosophy on performing arts is postulated as one of the most powerful and essential activities, to which we can invest our respective companies.