(To) come and see
a performance
(To) Come and See: a performance
(To) Come and See premiered in January 2016 in Zurich and since then the piece has been performed in various festivals and theatres. The duration of the piece is approximately 75 minutes and features five women on a bare floor with a long, pale curtain hanging in one corner of the space. They are playing with the subtle lines between sensuality, alienation and sometimes banality that voluntarily confuses. Surfing the advancing and retreating waves of sensual pleasure, the whole space pulsates, continuously reconfiguring the zones of inclusion and exclusion in which the spectators are both accomplices and intruders. The deliberate choice of a non-climax dramaturgy evokes a feeling of loss of control. This shared fragility creates as much discomfort as it gives tenderness.
Concept, Choreography, Performance / Simone Truong, Eilit Marom, Anna Massoni, Elpida Orfanidou, Adina Secretan - Light, Stage / Roger Studer - Mask / Dana Hesse, Katharina Kroll - Dramaturgy / Igor Dobricic - Outside eye / Jessica Huber - Production management / Anke Hoffmann - Assistance / Samira Bösch.
Production / association Overseas
Coproduction / Gessnerallee Zürich, Les Rencontres Chorégraphiques Internationales de Seine-Saint-Denis, Théâtre Sévelin 36 Lausanne
Support / City of Zurich Kultur, Canton Zurich Fachstelle Kultur, Pro Helvetia – The Swiss Arts Council, Ernst-Göhner-Stiftung, Fondation Nestlé pour l’Art, Canton Solothurn Amt für Kultur, Stanley Thomas Johnson Stiftung, Migros-Kulturprozent, Corymbo Foundation, Mifal Hapais Foundation.
Residences / Dansateliers Rotterdam, Isadora and Raymond Duncan Dance Research Center Athens, luna park, lieues Lyon, Wuzhen Theatre Shanghai, Minshen Art Museum Shanghai.
©Pictures / Anuschka Blommers and Niels Schumm, Yair Meyuhas, Flurin Bertschinger.
Here some reflections that have been written about the work:
“The quality of attention of the five performers allow each spectator to receive the proposition written in the night program: “Comfortably take a seat, and let the coincidences lead the rest”. We are linked one to another by the acuteness and the empathy we develop one towards each other and towards ourselves. (To) Come and See questions this attention, raising possible tensions, but mostly eminently inner and personal emotions and sensations. There is in this attention, a quality of presence to oneself, to the other and to time, that make it a major actor of our emotions. This is the path on which Eilit Marom, Anna Massoni, Elpida Orfanidou, Adina Secretan and Simone Truong carry us with lightness. Surprising sensations.” Fanny Brancourt in The Arts Chemists - 22/06/16 - Rencontres Chorégraphique internationales de Seine-Saint-Denis
"[The performance] is about appreciating which space is made through a subtraction of the masculine, what becomes of that space which appears and what kind of performativity arises. [...] We feel something coming. Something that would come from somewhere else and differently than in a “to come and see”. Something that would be a patient work on delaying. That would cultivate sensuality as an art of the attention to the other. That would prefer to maunder into diversity rather than rushing forward. That would ignore prior designation, or at least the priority of a goal, the exigency of a resolution, the wish of a climax.[...] We find in (To) Come and See the possibility of experimenting and feeling a collectivity with moving contours, offered as an accompaniment to the spectators, beyond the obvious games of univocal seduction.” Gérard Mayen - A subtraction of the masculine.
“This piece has a way of generating energy and warmth by manipulating the elements of theatre. [...] The interaction between the five dancers is transparent; it creates the impression that you look right through it. Nothing seems solid enough to claim a capital status.” - Camiel van Winkel - Saliva trees, or how I fell in love with a dancer, or thought I did.
“(To) Come and See played with physical stillness, presence and absence of the body, and direct address in ways we rarely see on Brisbane’s stages. The piece opened with the dancers scanning the audience for the person they would most like to sleep with and voicing their feelings of attraction to their desired person. The anticipation and discomfort was palpable as the audience collectively tensed its body, embarrassed by the display of eroticism and the declarations of admiration landing on it. This epitomised the power of dance to affect its audience, while brilliantly challenging the styles and forms of movement commonly associated with emotional expression.“ - Alana Tierney in Arts News - 2/03/2017 - Supercell Dance Festival, Brisbane.