Aren’t we all shaped by minor or major accidents? In any case, this is what the young man wearing a suit wants us to believe. While he is telling his stories, he is laying out a carpet of logic series, inevitable coincidences, possible accidents and beginning catastrophes. And he does all this in such a charming and eloquent way, that we, the audience, find ourselves suddenly convinced of accidental power and start to wonder where we would be without it. But then his body starts being put through the hoops of core and periphery, of language and grand gestures…
Caroline and Palle worked around the subject of accident, from the most banal to the most tragic and in particular the catastrophe (which comes from Greek katastophé and means “sudden turn”, a subject that also was dealt with in the classical tragedies (catharsis). This is something that they tried to keep in mind: to create a conference/performance with the character situated on a kind of arena, dealing with his downfall, his personal catastrophe.
It is a verbal cascade of associations and dissociations, of deductions and inductions, that Dyvrall pours over us. In this cascade of physical and social-political contemplations, talking about causes and consequences, about the loss of reality and the impossibility of communication, Dyvrall accompanies his incoherent words with a virtuoso sign language: precise, exactly timed movements that place the performance in a rhythmical framework.
“In Catastrophe Communication Combinatoria body and soul are caught in a vibrating apotheosis of the mortally ill, terminal theatrum mundi. But if our days are numbered, if reality is a nuclear bomb and the waiting a transgenic torture, then let’s go with a laugh, for heaven’s sake. Yes, let’s laugh! Dyrvall is a stand-up-comedian in Houellebeqcian style. His comfort is the slapstick, his catharsis the big disappearing act: he is burned up under a deafening soundscape. Gone. As if he had never existed.”
Isabella Steenbergen / for DWA Julidans/Freshdance July 2006