Vivances

lusive shapes. People. Darkness. Their bodies are stiff, move fast. Their dances are disjointed, deviant, dismantled, violent, urgent. A narrow ray of light passes through them momentarily, holds time, illuminates their pale skins, their tired eyes. The tracksuits sticking to their bodies. The music beats down on them with sustained cadences and eternal frequencies. Bodies are drenched. Sweat seems to slide off their flesh and fill the space until everyone is swimming in it. Suddenly, morning, soft and burning. The sun. A silence ringing like an unbearable pressure, like the weight of a beached whale. Elusive shapes again. A stained Ikea rug. A child-adult on the floor. A Nintendo 64. An apartment with potential, if only… Wet drywall bulging with the pressure of water waiting to pierce the walls, to invade the space. The whale, amorphous. If only this room wasn’t at the bottom of the ocean.

Between eternal ecstasy and everyday apathy, Vivances delves into anxiety and depression. Through the gaze of those who love us, the work is an attempt to represent differently, to represent sensorially and in a way that might not yet have been seen and experienced on stage, the sensation of depression, of sinking into the depths of anxiety, of comorbidity, of flirting with suicide. Vivances is a complex video and audio apparatus that brings the spectator into the sensitive reality of a daily life dictated by mental health disorders.

Vivances is a complex video and audio device that takes the viewer into the sensitive reality of a daily life dictated by mental health disorders.

Holographic video projections (Pepper’s Ghost) create an enigmatic universe where phantomatic forms, blurs and oppressive presences ebb and flow. By controlling the angles and quantity of light reflected on a transparent screen, superimposition and duplication effects play with the actors’ images. Suddenly, they appear, dissolve, float, dissociate, are both present and absent, or seen from above. As with the sensations produced by anxiety and depression, the device materializes the overwhelming nature of the spaces we inhabit as we pass through it, and the grandeur of the thoughts that oppress us.

The sound design amplifies this feeling. The ultra-sensitive audio apparatus, made up of condenser microphones and contact microphones concealed throughout the space, gives depth to text, speech and sound. The moment becomes sensitive, fragile, tense, overwhelming. The microphones’ responsiveness makes speech eminently intimate and immediate, a register of thought rather than thoughtful speech. It becomes a phenomenon that the performer observes in the moment of enunciation, as if they themselves have come to doubt that they are speaking. The text they deliver accentuates this sensation. Partly improvised and built on phrases the performers must constantly repeat and complete, the text becomes a long repetition of words that eventually lose their meaning. Through this process, the spoken word gains a sensory and experiential nature.

Vivances is not an autobiographical project. It’s not an identity quest. It’s not a coming-of-age narrative. Far from it. Vivances is an immersion in mental health disorders. The ones that go a little unnoticed, but that don’t hurt any less.