Two Ropes
Two vertical ropes are hanging from the ceiling, connecting a technical sky of grids and spotlights to a black-and-white floor. Is a vertical rope made for ascent or for descent? For getting ‘high’ or staying ‘grounded’? Do the ropes show a path to heaven or are they just weighing down, anchoring some unidentified flying objects to earth? Where are the fun-fair multicolored helium balloons that need our gravity not to disappear? Where is the paradisiac zeppelin we could get on and fly away with?
Zeppelin Bend consistently works with the contradictory set-up suggested by the vertical ropes: getting ‘high’ or staying ‘grounded’. It tries experiments with combinations in order to accomplish both, sometimes alternately, sometimes at once. It is not recommended to get involved in such risky experiments on one’s own. That is why the piece is a duet, unfolding an interlinked and unexpected collaboration between two dancers, a special kind of knot binding two bodies together, a ‘zeppelin bend’. In addition to ropes and dancers, two other props are needed, neither high nor low, somewhere in between and a little elevated: a two-by-two-meter platform downstage left, and a suspended flat tire upstage center.
Zeppelin Bend begins with a softly repeated gesture of rejection. With her eyes closed, firmly seated on the platform, Dancer One persistently shakes her head from side to side. Her hair seems to turn into the blades of a helicopter. A UFO saying ‘NO’: a soft, silent, unconcerned and intractable ‘NO’, creating its own retreat and vertigo.
Dancer Two enters the stage with a long series of skipping and bouncing steps. She is joined by Dancer One who adopts her pace. The hopping perambulation becomes a close cooperation. Dancer One and Dancer Two support each other throughout continuous changes of direction, trying to keep constant eye or hand contact despite quick shifts in orientation. They experiment with a new kind of pedestrian vertigo: the experience of a moving space created by voluntary disorientation in combination with the regular up-and-down rhythm of bouncing around together.
At one point, very up-tempo Gabber music starts playing and Dancer Two climbs onto the platform. Her body tries to follow the rhythm with frenetic footsteps hammering the platform. She is joined by Dancer One and, once again, the experiment becomes a cooperation where each dancer supports and helps the other. They are entering a new kind of vertigo, a vertigo of speed and endurance, of dopamine and stamina. They are seeking the intoxication of an impossible velocity and flirt with the limits of cardio training, close to fainting and blacking out.
So, we are introduced to three ways of getting ‘high’ on the ground, of being intoxicated without the use of substances: 1) persistently shaking one’s head from side to side, 2) moving in every direction with repeated bouncing steps, 3) jumping from one foot to the other as quickly as possible (or as quickly as the impossible music dictates). These methods evoke what Roger Caillois called ‘ilinx games’, like carrousels or swings, but here they exist without props or tools.
And when the main prop is used, when the dancers finally climb the ropes and hold on for a while, clinging to them like koalas, they certainly seem to experience the first moment of calm in this piece, swaying softly and sensually, looking at everything from above. But, alas, such a cradle cannot rock forever. Solitude and melancholia come back so fast, poisoning the illusionary heaven sketched by the ropes, that the dancers soon have to go back down again. So, Zeppelin Bend is a deceptive piece about the uselessness of props and the very inexistence of ‘back-worlds’.
And when, by the very end, after a second set of ‘ilinx games’ echoing the first, Dancer Two remains squatting alone under the swinging suspended tire, all she can do is cry for her absent friend. So, Zeppelin Bend is a piece about the necessity of friendship – friendship through episodes of intoxication without the use of substances. It shows us a way to reject the world without being alone.
Frédéric Pouillaude trained in ballet and contemporary dance and studied philosophy at the École normale supérieure (Paris). He has been Associate Professor of philosophy for more than 10 years at Sorbonne University. He is currently Full Professor of aesthetics at Aix-Marseille University. His publications include Unworking Choreography: The Notion of the Work in Dance, New York, Oxford University Press, 2017, and Représentations factuelles. Art et pratiques documentaires (Factual Representations: Art and Documentary Practices), Paris, Cerf, 2020.