Femke Gyselinck & GRIP & Caravan Production

How do you do that, to literally dance a dance language? If dance is a language, then what are you saying when you dance? Can a stage be a page? And if ‘dance phrases’ are sentences, can you then dance a question mark? Separate words? Letters?

These are the seemingly naive questions choreographer Femke Gyselinck starts out from, with her characteristically idiosyncratic, surprising and witty dance language. As in Moving Ballads, she seeks out the no man’s land where movements become expressive and bodies flirt with meaning. Letters 2 Dance is an organized misunderstanding of a hackneyed metaphor: choreo-graphy as dance-writing, starting from the smallest element, i.e. the alphabet.

In the book The Gymnastics of the Mind (a dance alphabet or typographic choreography), Femke Gyselinck ‘wrote’ a dance alphabet in which she explored the relationship between typography, typeface and movement. Together with dancers Sue-Yeon Youn and Luka Švajda, in Letters 2 Dance she makes the translation from page to stage: solidified letters regain their movement and search for meaning.

In an ongoing dialogue with composer and musician Liesa Van der Aa, the dancers interact with each other’s physical ‘handwriting’ and signature. They gradually create a moving field of tension that is as cryptic as it is nuanced, as concrete as it is enigmatic.

CREDITS
CONCEPT AND DANCE: Femke Gyselinck
DANCE: Sue-Yeon Youn and Luka Švajda
COMPOSITION AND PERFORMANCE MUSIC: Liesa Van der Aa
SCENOGRAPHY: Asli Çiçek
COSTUMES: Lila John
DRAMATURGY AND COACHING: Wannes Gyselinck
TECHNICAL COORDINATION & LIGHT AND SOUND: Brecht Beuselinck and Thomas Vermaercke
DIRECTION ASSISTANCE: Emma Meerschaert
PRODUCTION: Caravan Production
DISTRIBUTION: Caravan Production and GRIP
INTERNATIONAL DISTRIBUTION: A Propic – Line Rousseau, Marion Gauvent, Lara van Lookeren
COPRODUCTION: C-Mine (Genk, BE), KAAP (Bruges, BE), Kunstencentrum Voo?uit (Ghent, BE), kunstencentrum nona (Mechelen, BE), STUK (Leuven, BE), Workspacebrussels (BE), ICI-CCN Montpellier (FR) en Het Laatste Bedrijf (BE)
WITH THE SUPPORT OF: the Flemish Government and the Tax Shelter rule of the Belgian Federal Government

Photo: Robbrecht Desmet