simple life, 40 solos by 4 dancers for 40 viewers

simple life places two subjects in its center: a viewer and a dancer that meet one-on-one. The work is a repertoire of forty short dances, made and performed by four dancers. There is one dance per viewer, performed only once. Each dance is accompanied by a notebook, made simultaneously with its dance, as a diary and a navigation map, while noting references, diagrams, drawings, and descriptions of the working process. The work thematizes the exceptional porosity of dance, the vast space of encounter between a viewer and a dance, but also, the economy of dance as labor, a labor of art, as well as object, situation, and event of art itself.

In this sense, the work was created in a specific mode of choreographic practice. The forty solos were manufactured in three weeks, from July 6 to 27, 2009. Consciously chosen, a short, intensified period of daily creative practice extended from early morning until late in the evening. The dances were initially conceptualized as drafts and then developed into solos, which were subsequently integrated into daily repertoires. These repertoires were further organized into weekly series. The codes, ideologies, and discourses specific to a particular dance formed the primary axis of its choreographic structure. Such deliberate work flow produced a certain affirmative pressure, which challenged various clichés and mystifications around processes of art. It affirmed the notion that artistic creation is always a product, and sometimes a byproduct, of organized and collective focus. By establishing a mode in which everybody strains their creative, performative, and intellectual efforts to the maximum, the process itself became a performance. In its totality, this work leaves nothing behind but an event of dance, dance an sich, movement propelled by the work of dance itself.