X.DATES

In October 2018, as part of the Festival d'Automne in Paris, the P.A.R.T.S institute was invited to present a series of performances at the Centre National de la Danse. Alban Ovanessian presents a short solo, addressing the theme of the "date", here treated as an indication of a day, a month, a year, an act, having generated a physical interaction with the body. 

 

In December 2021, after joining the Norrdans dance company in Sweden, where numerous research spaces are set up for dancers, Alban Ovanessian decided to take up this theme again in order to present a research choreography entitled "X.DATES", this time in a solo format lasting about twenty minutes. 

Thus, "X.DATES" has the ambition to become a creation project of a new 50 min version that could be presented in various theatres, festivals, performative places.

 

Mentioned as a fact that refers to a specific time, a date is a way of chronologizing facts in time. Our lives are in.consciously immersed in an infinite number of dates that have affected/affect the way we interact with the Society in which we are actors and observers. Alban Ovanessian thus maintains in this new research this relationship between date and contextualisation, but integrates various mediums related to performativity (video, scenography, light, etc). 

 

"X.DATES" introduces, through the use of the past tense, events that have already taken place and are therefore defined as concrete and inked in the memory, as well as future dates/events. The future in this research is neither linked to possibility, supposition or projection but defined as absolute concreteness: to go through the past, the present, the future as if they could be thought, treated, physicalised in the same way. 

 

The notions of past, present and future are here interactive and used as materials to define/introduce the performer. The notions of learning, life experiences and self-dialogue with society are raised in order to question the relationship between time and experience while playing with the relationship between autobiography and fiction. 

 

During the collection and composition of these dates, the notions of fact and fiction emerged as the foundations of this research: fiction is a literary genre used to evoke various narratives far from the notion of reality, belonging to the realm of the imagination. 

Often associated with writers and artists, the stories told by the fiction genre are inherently false but can reveal a deeper truth about the world we live in than statistics or measurable facts.

 

Fiction can therefore present unexpected ideals linked to historical, social and political reality, allowing viewers, readers to imagine other realities and to consider new perspectives on the past/present/future. The dates in this research are partly reproductions of reality and partly dramaturgical inventions to make the spectator question the degree of reality and abstraction of these dates. 

 

The editing and sequencing of the dates becomes a process of research and narration through the classification of these dates: some are grouped by their theme, by their chronology and others by their oppositions.

 

Thus, "X.DATES" is operated as a utopian laboratory, an experimental investigation highlighting various themes and exploitations of reality, raising the following issues: 

How to physicalise these dates? How to present them in a narrative structure to the spectator ?