Digital Water
            thoughts based on artemis ignatiou dance performance cold water traces

Have you ever thought that water apart from its fluid quality could be hard and inexorable as a rock? The cold water traces is a dance performance that is challenging the conventional modes of reading and comprehending the relationship of man with the natural forces. The movement of the choreography has a pure electronic texture, full of falls and spasms, and the chilled stage- setting is a connotation of a cold cyberspace. These two elements infiltrate the conscious and subconscious psychological dynamics which relate to the agony of man to leave behind his traces, symbols of being a substantive persona instead of a virtual self projection.  The water, -as a representative of the forces of nature- and its peculiarity in erasing the traces being left over, underlines the performative aspect of the choreography :  the struggle of re(trans)formation of identities and collectivities is happening now, in front of your own eyes. As a result, through the dance interface perception is now in a state of flux where the only dominant landscape seems to be one of difference and change. The end of choreography is a video projection of human digital traces, where post-human beings are melded to the morphology of their technological supplements.  

Cold water traces explores the notion of the dreamland as well. It plays with the problematic distinction between ‘being’ and ‘acting’, between ‘performance’ and ‘the real’, as well as with the performance of identity. Dreams are carnivalesque and impious. They welcome contrapositions and celebrate paradoxes. The reconciliation of the electronic quality of the water with the soft facet of a diamond dream is dance’s celebration of difference. Leaving the theatre you have the image of a traveller packing his dreams in a thimble or trying to pile them up in a turquoise plastic box.

 eleni garoufalia
contemporary art historian

Magazine: "CHOROS'