Werewolf Heart takes us into the middle of a straight highway to nowhere, an unknown place somewhere in Mexico, maybe the famous U.S. Route 66 that goes through Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Santa Monica, the Main Street of the glorious shining America.
The strong diurnal light comes up against the black colour that sticks to the figure’s skin like a leech that cannot be released. An inner drama is taking place between dream and nightmare reality. A poetic and aesthetic sublimation of disquiet, an existential anguish and a psychic disorder is performed with a precise mastery of physical contortion, imbalance and disorientation. The simplicity, the banality and directionality of the solar road make the disequilibrium and the pathos even more fascinating, provoking a kind of drunkenness to the viewer, carried away by a sort of delightful intoxication, a communicative poisoning enhanced by the music and the lyrics composed and interpreted by Ryan Gosling of Dead Man’s Bones.
Dalel Bacre exalts a magical lost character at grips with her own inner demons, or with the hostile ones who wander all around in those sunny lands haunted by sorrowful and dark periods of their collective history. The unsteadiness and vertigo she embodies is palpable through the emotionally charged gestures, the motions and the travelling effects of a detached and distant gaze on oneself. The hardships and crazy race, the personal trajectory thrown forward, backwards, the body and psychic Dionysian dance gymnastic, the self orientation attempts and the exalted thirst for life are still intertwined with the cosmic harmony, the hidden apollonian mathematical beauty that governs the visible through the invisible: the united polarity that gives birth to tragedy. As shadows in a red dress, Dalel incarnates an active force that generates style[1], suspense and mystery that are, at the same time, enchanting and somberly addictive.
Text by Katherine Sirois
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No Dancing Today
In this performance the conjunctural, accidental, and unexpected coexist through choreography. I am not looking to develop a new idea or a new concept with No Dancing Today. What I am doing is opening an experiential space where the scenic act itself plays the lead; a moment represented as the here and now. The work I have created lives in a zone of hybridization between dance and the concept of performance, moving between rehearsed choreography and improvisation. The exhibition is built from the use of two key elements, a mask and a turntable.
The space is filled with an atmosphere that evokes a sublime moment, doing so I combine technical and aesthetic tools with physical performance.
Text by Dalel Bacre
Footnotes
^ Formula used by Aby Warburg referring to Robert Visher’s notion of Empathy and it’s role. RAMPLEY. Matthew (1997). «From Symbol to Allegory: Aby Warburg's Theory of Art». The Art Bulletin. Vol. 79, n° 1, 44. Aby Warburg, Ausgewählte Schriften und Würdigungen, ed. D. Wuttke, Baden-Baden, 1992, 13.