After “exposition corps”, “superposition corps” and “Your body is the shoreline”, three choreographies that exposed the body in all its rawness and individual states, this time Saskia Hölbling intends to put her body in context. It could be a country – Austria; it could be a city, or once again the space of an apartment. It could be anything – but always the pressure exerted by a particular environment creates a sense of restriction of body, gender, emotion.
In “Jours Blancs” (White Days), the flat space is a trap, perfectly concealing repulsion, in which everyday gestures are undermined by desire, fear, and frustration. In it, the female body does not exist as a figure or image, but only embodies a question: it questions and unites desire, pain and anger. The choreographer places herself in a natural setting that becomes more and more foreign with each passing moment. Is it her apartment or someone else’s – her body or not hers? It is a place without memory, without individuality, where each successive gesture stands in opposition to the next, where every everyday object can provoke fear or become the beginning of an obsession. Her blinded body, unfathomable, collides with the penetrating gazes of the spectators. They intersect causing suffering, laughter, violence or hypersensitivity.
The source of discomfort, however, remains impossible to name: the viewer is confronted with a series of consequences, entanglements – with repetition that degenerates, with a self-propagating virus that travels from space to objects, from objects to the body. Saskia Hölbling exposes the process within the body – she offers us the key to understanding our possible relationship with desires, pain and anger.
– Gilles Amalvi