Dossier Outwards (Exporation

#1)

General information
Name: David
Surname: Van Dijcke
Mailing address: Rue de la Caserne 1, 1000 Brussel
Phone number: +32494779905
Email: david.van.dijcke@gmail.com
Project title: Outwards (Exploration #1)
Duration: 25-30 minutes
Participants: on video: Jano Vulbeau, Zehra Proch; live: Eleonore Van Godtsenhoven
Biography
David Van Dijcke is a young performance artist, dancer and actor based in Brussels. Currently he
is finishing his Bachelors degree in Drama at the KASK School of Arts in Ghent, where he has
created two pieces so far, a solo work and a work for two dancers and a physical actor. Apart from
this he is also enrolled in a Training Cycle for contemporary dance in Dance center Jette, in
Brussels, where he has had the chance to work with teachers and groups such as David
Zambrano, Fighting Monkey, Peeping Tom, Iaki Azpillaga, among many others. The last two
summers he was also a participant at the P.A.R.T.S. summerschool.
As a performer, David has played with fABULEUS, a theatre and dance company with which he
toured through Belgium and the Netherlands; with cie Woest, a Dutch dance company; and in
Spheres, a piece by Simon Van Schuylenbergh and Siska Baeck, based on the work of Peter
Sloterdijk. He also played the main role in Its not about you anymore, a short movie by Louise De
Groef that played on festivals in countries such as Greece, Portugal, China, Germany among
others.
His interests lie with philosophy and literature and the space they occupy within Western tradition
and the concept of human consciousness developed therein. Less than thinking a distinction
between body-mind or theory-practice, David believes that these disciplines constitute within the
human a place that is beyond thinking, beyond consciousness, beyond the traditional concept of
liberalist humanism. Performance is in this perspective not a literary tradition, as it has been for
long in European theatre. It is exactly that activity that occupies the space literature and philosophy
constitute within the human subject, which is a space in which an image of the not-yet-human
arises, a transgressive space that allows us to think new futures for ourselves and confronts us
with a radical otherness - the real - not to be transcended.

Performance guide
There is a renewal, it will flourish, be reborn, but there is also a
cut, the broken stone on the threshold from where the backward
glance, the obsession with the traces, originates. Forwards there
is a promise that cannot be fulfilled, backwards there are only
your own traces. (Alain Badiou, The Century)
On a roof I saw large, sturdy hooks placed halfway up. Suppose
someone falls from a rooftop couldnt he maybe catch hold of
one of these hooks with an arm or a leg? If I fell from a rooftop, Id
plummet to the ground. But if a hook was there, Id come to a stop
halfway down!
Just a little later I might say to myself: Once an architect
planned this hook, and without it Id be dead. I should be dead,
but Im not at all - in fact, Im alive. A hook was put there.'
Lets say my presence, my life, are inescapable. Something
impossible and incomprehensible would still be its principle.
I understand now - picturing the moment of falling - that theres
nothing in this world unless it meets up with a hook.
Usually we avoid seeing a hook. We confer an aspect of
necessity on ourselves, on the universe, on the earth, on people.
With a hook arranging the universe, I plunged into an infinite
play of mirrors. This play had the same principle as a fall blocked
by a hook. Can anyone get more into the core of things? I shook. I
couldnt go on. Rapture within me, emotion welling up to the point
of tears, rituals of darkness that defy description, every orgy in

the world and all times blending inthis light. (Georges Bataille,
Chance)
Over the course of several
studios. I gave them specific
months, Eleonore and I have
scores, challenges, tasks and texts
received video recordings of 20
to work with, but in the end they
minutes sessions which Zehra
were as free as they managed to
Proch, a dance student at the
be, the only limitations being their
own bodies and thoughts, the
conservatory in Antwerp and Jano
room they worked in and the
Vulbeau, dance student at the
impossible question to try and
conservatory
of
Lille,
have
establish a connection through the
recorded alone in their schools

lens of a camera that returned

none of their questions, proposals
or actions, nothing other than
their own shallow (omgebogen)
reflection. Whatever they came up
with,
became
our
material.
Instead of working as a team to
distill a vocabulary through which
our work would communicate,
Eleonore and I would simply use
Jano
and
Zehra.
Through
improvisation, they would provide
us with raw material, which we
would process through our own
bodies.
We would have their recordings
projected on big white screens,
set up in a circle of three screens
around us. Two screens would
show the new recordings we had
received from Jano and Zehra, a
third screen an editing from the
recordings
of
the
previous
sessions, shot from a perspective
facing this particular third screen,
in this way creating a kind of
mirror palace, a mise en abyme of
all the different sessions. Also, it
evoked a feedback mechanism in
our
working
progress,
continuously feeding our new
sessions with recurrent material,
blurting out distorted, mirrored,
reframed and reworked images of
the past. In my mind I like to refer
to it as a mediating instance or
more simply a beast, constantly
regurgitating new aspects of
familiar
memories,
but
also
invariably
incorporating
new
information into its complex
structures, without ever casting a
prejudice about whether or not the
new found material was well-fitted
for its constellation. There arent
many systems alike.
At the start of the sessions I often
worried whether what would
happen in this constellation would
be interesting enough, technically
and aesthetically. It turned out to
be of no importance.

In a kind of homage to the

findings of great artists of the 20th
century, this demonstrated once
more that in the creation of an
artwork, as it is in life, beauty,
meaning and necessity are most
found in a state of co-incidence, at
the unimaginable convergence of
incidents.
In the actual work, all screens
show the same editing. Jano and
Zehra are no longer explicitly
present, only a suggestion of their
profound influence on the work
remains. The whole set-up could
serve as a metaphor for every
artistic process, and in this
context
addresses
pertinent
questions about subjects such as
originality, agency, superficiality,
intentionality and constitution of
signification. Jano and Zehra, two
trained dancers, are reduced to
two-dimensional pixels without
any constitutive power or physical
presence,
let
alone
artistic
expressivity. They conjure up the
obscene underside of the piece,
while we, the supposedly real-time
performers are lost in a crisis of
space,
navigating
somewhere
between semblance and reality.
Lost in a capsule shielded from the
outside world, we endlessly see
only ourselves and are limited to a
re-enactment of something we did
not even primarily experience.
The randomness we were faced
with in the recordings of the two
dancers has been neutralized in
the form of a seemingly coherent
artwork. But in the opposition of a
structured
inside
versus
an
outside
characterized
by
an
increasing entropy, the apparent
coherence and safety of the
structure functions as a symptom
of repressed violence. The exterior
world is never far away, but
always impossible to inhabit.
Where do we, inhabiters of
symbolic
spaces,
want
to
constitute our reality? What will be

our basis to do so? Which space,

which time, do we want to
inhabit? How is it possible for
human beings, whose humanity
has traditionally manifested itself
on the inside, to live in a world of
exteriority? Does a network have
a soul? Do we need a soul?
Once we have conceived an
image of
terrestrial
globalization as a fundamental event of
the modern times, we will
begin to understand why the
present, third,
globalization,

triggered by the fast images o

the internet, has lead to a
general crisis of
space.
That crisis is denoted with a concept that
is as prevailing as it is obscure:
virtuality. The
virtual space of the
cybernetic media is the
modern
form of the outer that is impossible to
reconcile with the categories of
the divine
interior;
it
is
presented as a technological
exteriority - with other words as
an outer to which
no
inner
corresponds. (Peter
Sloterdijk)

Technical requirements
-

3 beamers capable of projecting video in life-size format

3 projection screens of approximately 2,25x3m, white
4 computer screens
large enclosed space, preferably light floor color, possibility of completely darkening the space
4 dvd players/laptops to play video on the computer screens
time required for set-up max. 2 hours
possibility that we provide the material ourselves

Presentational preferences
- the piece is created with the intention of showing it as a continuous performance, by playing it
three times every two hours for example

- single showings are also possible

- best suited for contexts with flexible concept (e.g. museum, gallery, performance festival,
vernissage, focus on young artists..) `

Price
- price to be determined in mutual agreement
- expense reimbursement is minimal demand

Video links
https://vimeo.com/139134269#t=0s
https://vimeo.com/126501684