Hiding Dance behind Technology

There is a very fine line between not taking yourself seriously and pretending you are not. Reassuringly, in Solo - le doute m’habite, Philippe Decouflé first clearly draws that line. Then, he crosses that line by stretching the most mundane choreography well beyond its breaking point.

All signs point to an enjoyable experience at first. The room is quickly dropped into darkness. A fluid blue form takes shape on a video screen. On this screen, shadows created by Decouflé’s hands dance freely. It is refreshing for him to avoid the trap of cheap shadow puppets, but such restraint from tackiness is short-lived.

Abruptly, a disjunctive break occurs when Marilyn Manson’s cover of Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” is played over the speakers. A live feed of Decouflé’s feet is shown on the screen behind which he stands, using the shadows created by his hands to playfully lift his digital feet.

Finally, Decouflé directly addresses the audience. Since most people claim that solos are always inherently autobiographical, he decides to present his family with the help of photographs. His monologue is brief but, as Shakespeare said, brevity is the soul of wit.

Sadly, it is all downhill from here, Decouflé subjecting us to what he defines as “abstraction”. Sole dancer on stage, he still manages to move with his multiple shadows and video projections of himself (often with a slight delay) that populate the screen. The set-up is complex, but the choreography is painfully simplistic.

Even the playful interactions with his shadows and video replicas quickly become boring as they stretch on and on. As a videomaker, I have to admit that the way video effects are used in live shows is, to put it kindly, often excessively naïve. Taking an uninteresting image, changing its colour, and multiplying it endlessly only creates multiple uninteresting images in a different colour.

When Decouflé shows us a live video feed of his fingers dancing to music on a table, or when he attempts to solely recreate choreography inspired by Busby Berkeley’s “perfectly synchronized” massive dance numbers from 1930s Hollywood musicals through video technology, force is to admit that it feels like watching a series of bad videos on youtube. Watching the accidental minimalist dance performed by the musician onstage often proves to be more interesting than that of the “real” dancer.

The show ends with all its technological components being stripped away, leaving Decouflé to simply perform onstage without any excess. What we suspected all along can now clearly be seen: there is indeed very little to hold onto here in terms of choreography.

At the beginning of the show, Decouflé asks the audience to be kind and to take into consideration the limits of his body at the age of forty-five. But there are older artists, like Montreal’s own Margie Gillis and Paul-André Fortier, who have not let the potential restrictions imposed by their body limit their creativity when it comes to choreography. It is more than time to admit that technology is no substitute for creativity.

This show is finished, but watch the Usine-C website for more multidicisplinary art…