Disappearance at Ballet de Marseille/ICKAmsterdam

DISAPPEARANCE is the second part of the diptych APPEARANCE – DISAPPEARANCE. Choreographers Emio Greco and Pieter Scholten describe the performance as an ode to disappearing.

DISAPPEARANCE picks up where APPEARANCE left off. In this performance thirteen bodies, music, projections, lighting, a radio presenter and children’s voices come together in the ether, an interspace where everything vanishes and emerges, where bodies yearn for a voice and voices yearn for a body. It was to become a sensorial and intuitive experience that starts in the dark and emerges into the light via blue – red – yellow with innocence and hope, from a simple black to a complex white hole. Light designer Floriaan Ganzevoort made a light object that can move and change colour, floating in the space as a rectangular line. The colors that mark the parts of the performance are indicated with light and change the scene temporarily in a monochromatic world. This results in the bodies of the dancers having a different relation to the space, the music and the sounds and to each other. The light object has a counterpart that consist of light beams, that draw the same rectangular shape in the air.

Greco and Scholten worked with the dancers on the strength and vulnerability of intuition, naïvety, urgency and innocence. These character values that are vanishing from our present-day society more and more are embraced by the dance. What if they too disappear; what will remain then? The dancers strive to anchor their existence no matter how transitory and ineffectual it may seem.

In this multidisciplinary performance, projections create a mystical spirits realm of dissolved movements and (in)tangible memories. In the ether, the dancers face a confrontation with edited pop songs by the likes of David Bowie, Björk and Radiohead cut with electronic music, radio and children’s voices.

The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it. (John 1:1-18)