After rehearsals we head to the square outside Vooruit where in the
last three days, Meg Stuart and her company Damaged Goods have been
staging a series of four hour improvisations s. In the theatre at least
Anna Viebrock’s set for Meg’s Visitors Only (a piece that I contributed
some text to) was always hugely imposing – a monolithic two storey
house-structure - but here, placed outdoors between the library and
some other public building it almost looks small – as though a
dolls-house has been bisected by Gordon Matta-Clark and set up here
beside the road in this small Belgian city.
Sat facing the house Paul Lemp and his musicians are playing a kind of
endless not-changing and always-changing whirlpool of cello, bass and
echo – a circular tide into which the dancers ‘on stage’ and those of
us watching are drawn alike without a chance to escape. For this final
day the dancers work four hours around a single section of the old
Visitors performance – a task that involves them, like the music,
forever spinning and rotating either solo or in constantly recombining
groupings. Observed from the street the dance is people spinning alone,
spinning together, circling, walking, twisting, knotting, freaking out,
pacing softly, running, all in circles, clockwise, anticlockwise; ones
view of anyone only ever partial, framed up and fractured by the
architecture of the set – windows, doorways, cutaway walls.
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