For whom she dances is not clear, about a performance of Renee van Trier
2009
For whom she dances is not clear. For whoever she is there, is not clear too. And what it is about or why this is so and not otherwise, either. A small white painted wooden fencing that makes a shielded space where once children played on a school square, to keep a sheep that one wants to sell, too small for a deer but big enough for Renee of Trier who does a little weird here. At least that seems so!
Slowly she has herself-dressed in a too short skirt and a purse to her shoulder-erected as an old animal that smells feed and stretches sleepy from being old and tired of the animal. She becomes man and for a moment extremely tempting: a do-it-yourself-night club-act. Pole-dancing on the rythm of a sad beat. Free under the trees of a school square.
The longer she dances, first obeying but gradually prisoner of the beat and now with another colleague in Pink who monotonous moves her left leg ike a doll, the longer she dances the more the image of a still life arises in which the dancer himself frees herself from all references that the performance did evokes.
What remains is an image without context and this is painful because it makes every kind of empathy impossible, but it is also a rich image because we see concealment in its barest form. The spectator cannot cope with this and starts staring and becomes also naked and ignorant as well. He sees nothing more and is in an autistic world. ‘ Give Me Love ‘ begs Renee van Trier in another performance like Songtext. We all want that. We give love but do not know what comes from it.
Henk Visch
24 september 2009