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Mon / 31.08 / 20:00

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August DanceFestival 2009:

MARK TOMPKINS /FRANCE/ "empty holes"



 

"empty holes" the life and love and death of John and Doris Dreem 1983 / 2008

 

to do is to be - Descartes
to be is to do - Nietzsche
do be do be do - Sinatra

 

empty holes was originaly created in april 1983. It marked the end of a five year collaboration with Lila Greene (Les Productions Lima Dreem) and celebrated the founding of the company I.D.A. (International Dreems Associated).

In 1976, Jacqueline Robinson, whom I had met about a year after my arrival in Paris, invited me to present an evening in her studio Avenue Junot. I created naked traces, my first full length solo. For the first time I introduced Doris Dreem, a character who would reappear again and again in performances over the next 8 years. In 1977, Doris' partner John Dreem made his first appearance in love letters, and the following year in another solo, each one's own. I played both roles.

When Lila and I began working together in 1978, we decided to continue exploring the relationship between John and Doris by doubling their presences on stage. Each played Doris, each played John. We created Double Sens, Sweet Dreems and A Voile et à Vapeur. Our last creation together in 1982, La Séparation de Biens, was actually composed of two solos, Lila's Swooning Slugs and the first version of empty holes. My solo was inspired and informed by my collaboration with the lighting designer Alain de Cheveigné and his fascinating use of shadows. Working with the demultiplication of my own dancing shadow, I spent two thirds of the performance behind a screen. John and Doris were not involved.
To make the transition from the fruitful collaboration with Lila to my new role of company director, I decided to make a new and definitive version by reinjecting John and Doris into the solo - empty holes - the life and love and death of John and Doris Dreem. The performance took many of the themes and obsessions I had been exploring and developing since my arrival in Paris in 1973 : life and love and death ; questions about identity and gender ; the multiplication and mirrors of self and other ; the combination of movement, voice, text, song, light and sound into complex and composite images. It allowed me to conclude and faire le deuil of my early years in Paris and make a bridge to the next step - creating a company, developing and directing larger groups, transmitting my ideas and visions to other collaborators - performers, musicians, scénographers, lighting designers...

 

Over the years I have almost systematically shifted back and forth from solo to group projects. The process of making solos is by nature solitary, but the exhilaration and depth of solo performance is extremely instructive and rewarding. It has always been a way of searching, defining and verifying for myself the materials and tools I wish to transmit and share with the performers in the group pieces. Group processes are more social - playful, conflictual and gregarious - and because of the number facilitate the construction of complex images.

A complex image is an image with several dimensions - first of all the surface appeal, the seemingly superficial face value. What you see. The first degree. Then there is the contradiction, contained in the image through the accumulation and distribution of antinomic forces. What you see is never what you get. The second degree. Then are added, through processes of association, citation and reference, all the other imaginable and even unimaginable meanings, inversions, contradictions and countermeanings. A complex image obliges the spectator to work, to wonder, to reflect, to construct his or her own point of view from what is given. And honestly, I love when the spectator works.

I have never done nor desired to do a reconstruction of any of my pieces. Every new work is a unique and lively process, made with and for specific people, places and times. When it dies, it is gone. My repertory consists solely of pieces that have been performed continually since their creation and currently includes Hommages, four solos dating from 1989 to 1998, presented together since 1998, Song and Dance (2003), ANIMAL Male (2005) and ANIMAL Female (2007).

empty holes was performed ten times after its creation in 1983. It is the only piece I have ever really seriously considered reconstructing because it contains the seeds of almost all the themes and obsessions which have pursued me over the years. But other projects always came along that took priority. Now, twenty five years later, I have decided to reenact it, in the sense of visiting an old friend who you have not seen for many years. It brings back a flood of memories from the past, enters again the filter of the present and acts as a catalyser for the future.

Mark Tompkins, january 2007

 


 

Concept, texts, songs and interpretation: Mark Tompkins (except "non je ne regrette rien": Vaucaire/Dumont, "strangers in the night": Kaempfert/Singleton/Snyder, "am i blue": Clark/Akst, "last dance": Jabara)
Dramaturgy and stage direction: Gerard Gourdot
Light: Alain de Cheveigné
Technical direction: Rodolphe Martin
Songs by: Mark Tompkins & Nuno Rebelo, Vaucaire/Dumont, Kaempfert/Singleton/Snyder, Clark/Akst, Jabara
Created april 1983 at the Festival Bonjour in Perpignan and reenacted october 2008
with Marseille Objectif Danse at Festival actOral.7, Marseille and at Théâtre de la Cité internationale, Paris.
Tallinn performance is supported by French Cultural Centre and CulturesFrance

 

http://www.idamarktompkins.com/

 


The following texts come from the original 1983 dossier.

 

 

empty holes is the accumulation, the synthesis, the high point of a lifetime love story, and of ten years of making work. It is the essence of my research concerning image, surface and volume, voice, text, narration, movement and stage presence.

DORIS DREEM was born in the streets of the USA around 1973, the child of different post 68 liberation movements. She came to Europe and made her first stage appearance in 1976, in naked traces. In the fall of the same year, she performed with her big sister in be:fore:plays. In 1977, she met JOHN DREEM in love letters, and their relationship blossomed in Les Gens Qui Habitent dans Les Maisons de Verre I.

The tragic rupture of their liason the following year in each ones own left DORIS full of despair, but gave birth to VIDINE DREEM, the enigmatic child, and at the same time permitted the encounter of the true double, the real twin, and the formation of the couple JohnetDoris et JohnetDoris Dreem.

The DREEMS relationship expanded and thrived with the adventure of the Théâtre Autarcique in Les Gens Qui Habitent dans Les Maisons de Verre II -VI and elsewere - Louche Mouche, Double Sens, Sweet Dreems, A Voile et à Vapeur...Unfortunately, the stress of modern life being as it is, and love stories being as they are, the couple slowly disintegrated, leaving however a work structure, Les Productions Lima Dreem.

Since its initial creation in 1982, empty holes has undergone a number of radical transformations until finding its definite form, presented for the first time at the Festival de Perpignan in april 1983. Once again reunited, John et Doris play together for the last time before disappearing definitively - empty holes - the life and love and death of John et Doris Dreem.
WORK

Anything that is is quite enough if it is. Gertrude Stein

Mark Tompkins plays with crossing borders, exploring the cracks and ambiguities of frontiers, juggling with the in-betweens, using anything and refusing nothing which seems necessary for a precise proposition.

Forms - choreographic, theatrical or musical, improvised or meticulously composed. Spaces - interior or exterior, classical theatres or urban spaces, private houses or abandoned factories. Matters - physical : dancing, acting, gesture, action ; sound : words, texts, songs, recordings ; visual : slides, videos, shadows.

He always endeavours to question the form, the composition and the play, as well as the relationship between the performer and the audience. Exploring the diffraction and breaking up of traditional space and time, working in « non theatrical » spaces or environments of « instant composition », researching « extra-ordinary » acting states both realistic and abstract, questioning the role and activity of the spectator. These are some of the principal preoccupations in his work. The notions of interdependancy and interactive simultaneity are the fundamental basics of his research, both at the level of the elaboration as the well as the execution of the work itself.

If the performances of Mark Tompkins are often radically different from each another, there is still a main theme, a constant, which nourishes the work and demands its perpetual renewal. The fragile and feverish research of the least commom denominateur, of the essential act. Neither too much, nor too little. Just. And the paradox, the contradiction, fully accepted, that once it is named it is no longer .
WHAT YOU SEE IS NEVER WHAT YOU GET

The episodes of the Dreem saga always revolve around the same story, a story which is not really a story. A story of impossible love.

This story is told using whatever type of support is considered necessary in a given situation : videos, slides, shadows, objects, sets, texts, voice, sound and recordings, actions, movements. The work of composition consists in writing a scenario by simultaneously associating layers of sound and images to create an audiovisual space which tells not one but several stories. By superposition, by juxtaposition, by interference, the elements begin to call and respond to one another in complete interdependancy. At once a collage of heterogenous elements, but also a décollage in the sense that an element can transform, enhance or remove the meaning from another. A perpetual striptease where the unveiling must not show everything but suggest what remains hidden.

The elements used are both general and personal, even autobiographical. In this sense, John and Doris do not exist, have never existed, will never exist. They are lies to propel the scenario forward, to give a semblance of fiction where there is only real life. It is by their presence that John and Doris pass from one state to another outside of any psychological frame. So that the play is both theatrical, in the manner that the states engender each other emotionally, and choreographic, in the manner that the states provoke one another in an abstract way, to the point that they coexist simultaneously, without falling into the pure abstractions of dance.

John et Doris Dreem walk on the razor's edge where the scenario prevents abstraction from winning, but where the abstraction bursts upon an ambiguous space which opens unkown and unnameable states. And which seduces them and towards which they run.

 

 



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