Residency Femke Gyselinck at ICI-CCN Montpellier

In the frame of the Dance Hub exchanges, ICI-CCN de Montpellier welcomes Femke Gyselinck, sent by STUK, for a residency in Montpellier.

Femke Gyselinck works on her production "Letters 2 Dance" during this residency.

Letters 2 Dance is the choreographic development of Gymnastics of the Mind (2020), a research project inspired by the book ABECEDA (1926). Femke Gyselinck decomposed the alphabet through dance, and examined the relation between movement and typography, between letters and dance. This resulted in her own dance alphabet that will be published in collaboration with Koenig Books in the autumn of 2021.

Letters 2 Dance continues this research and translates it from book to stage. The solidified letters, shown as photographed poses, rediscover their movement, and come together as words and sentences. The performance searches for ways to ‘literally’ write dance, looks for the boundaries of that metaphor and through that search ends up clearly articulating the idiosyncrasy and irreducibility of dance.

Three dancers (Femke Gyselinck, Sue-Yeon Youn & Luka Švajda) share the stage with eclectic muscician/composer Liesa Van der Aa. The composition of letters and musical samples go hand in hand: the dance directs the music, and the music, at the same time, determines the choreographic writing. Letters here takes on its second meaning: as a letter that can be sent, between the different dancers, or between movement and music.

Asli Çiçek’s scenography further depicts the piece’s play with literalness and metaphor. Her lightly coloured, transparent planes appear as pages on the stage and support the idea of the dancing body as the tip of a pen, a letter being danced upon a page.

Letters 2 Dance balances its choreographic script on the border of sign and meaning. The performance invites the audience to take part in the game of deciphering, with the dance language in a continuous friction between representation and abstraction.

On October 28 at 19:00 a work-in-progress showing is taking place at Studio Yano at ICI-CCN de Montpellier.

Photo gallery © Robbrecht Desmet