Species (Latin, pronounced spe{k}iès): aspect, appearance, vision
Initially, there is a desire to turn things upside down.
To reverse the process refined by La Zampa over the years, to take as a starting point a place of disappearance in order to work on a form of appearance.
To consider the disappearance (of the body) as the ultimate goal.
To probe its presence while disappearing.
Then, there is an enigma.
A sentence from Jacques Derrida, projecting into the future and the past in a same gesture, referring to an impossible direction.
A sentence with hints of premonition and warning.
A dead end, almost a threat. “The future belongs to ghosts”.
From there, we had the will to contact a specialist of enigmas – Caryl Férey author of new detective fiction – for him to write a text that would be inspired by the Egyptian “Book of the Dead”.
And the need to put a silhouette, or four hundred faces, behind these invisible presences of today. To sketch them implicitly.
“Spekies” is a variation around the disappearance of the body confronting a dancer (Magali Milian or Romuald Luydlin, according to sets) to a guitarist (Marc Sens), 50 survival blankets, and a few dictaphones.
A dancer who is relieved from any artifice. An interchangeable silhouette (because ghosts have no sex) which seems to slide on the tips of sneakers* in the landscape it builds for itself, until it sinks down.
A musical universe without beginning or end, which spreads out in order to expand the time, to put the body in tension, to reveal its presence by flashes, to empty its substance, and to finally orchestrate its demise.
Metallic membranes which sediment into mountains, move, unwrap themselves, unfold around the emptiness, become relics, get deformed and create shapes, generate strange feelings of déjà vu.
And an hypnotic litany that clings to the body, coming out of a thousand sound sources, as if to track the forgotten, the ones who are ejected and erased from our time.
“…the one upon whom the rain hits
the one who arouses no sleeper
the one who has millions of them
the one who sleeps in his body
the one who lies between the rocks of the deep
the one who believes in clouds of powder
the one who swallows his arm
the one who closes his eyes at night and makes everything enter the night…”
Caryl Férey
* in a movement inspired by turfing, a street dance born on the west coast of the United States.