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Creatures at rest
Durational performance (3 hours) by Alice Van der Wielen-Honinckx, 2021.
On a slowly turning plateau, three performers move very slowly, while looking for as much comfort as possible. Meanwhile, they open their senses equally to everything that surrounds them.
This durational work asks performers and visitors to abandon their usual pace and modes of attention, diving instead into a time-zone where other kinds of relation and affection become possible. By inviting people to set aside—even briefly or imperfectly—the productivist, instrumentalizing mindset shaped by competitive environments and hurried lives, the piece creates room for a different register of experience to emerge.
The weight-change in a pelvis, a hand sliding on a fabric, a gaze meeting the texture of a wall with the same quality as it will, a moment later, meet another gaze, … Everyone present can taste what happens when, for an extended moment, nothing really happens—and yet an infinity of micro-changes and shifting relations are constantly at play.
Concept Alice Van der Wielen-Honinckx
Creation Jeanne Colin, Salomé Genès, Anna Heuer Hansen, Robson Ledesma, Mariana Miranda, Sofia Rodriguez, Alice Van der Wielen-Honinckx
Performance Jeanne Colin, Anna Heuer Hansen, Mariana Miranda, Emmi Väisänen, Alice Van der Wielen-Honinckx
Music Stav Yeini
Costumes Sofie Durnez, Alice Van der Wielen-Honinckx
Scenography Sofie Durnez, Benjamin Vandewalle
Assistant scenography Tine Germer, Alice Van der Wielen-Honinckx
Coaching Christine De Smet
Co-production DiR – Dance in Residence Brandenburg, Garage 29, KAAP, Musea Brugge, Museum M.
With the support of Vlaamse Gemeenschapscommissie (VGC)
Creative Producers arp:
Dates
May 2021, OFFestival, Garage 29, Brussels
July 2021, Dansand! Festival, Japanese Garden,
November 2021, Playground Festival, Museum M, Leuven
September 2022, O museu como Performance, Fundação Serralves, Porto
March 2024, Biennale of Women in Art Brussels: A Show of Resistance, Espace Vandenborght, Brussels
Reviews
Sometimes the contact seems sensual and deliberate, but more often I feel as though I’m watching the unconscious movements of organisms dwelling in the dark depths of the oceans. Or perhaps even a microscopic image of an amoeba. Not really, of course. There are three human bodies in front of me. This becomes especially clear when someone finally gets up and stands, moving with endless slowness. But their interplay of movements seems aimless; I feel as though I’m watching random transitions of form and movement in single-celled organisms.
Bas Blaasse in "Bewegen buiten de tijd", pzazz.theater, 18.11.2021
Alice Van der Wielen-Honinckx filters the individual out of her performance until only connection between the performers remains. [...] The stage spins, the wheels squeak, bodies move toward and away from each other. 'Creatures at rest' goes on for hours at a stretch. It is therefore irrelevant when the performance begins or ends. Occasionally some music plays. After a while, you find yourself staring at the performers and time seems to slow down for a moment.
Elie Agniel in "Een blik op intimiteit", pzazz.theater, 20.11.2021
Dansand! Festival, Japanese Garden Ostend, July 2021, © Stanislav Dobak.
“I created Creatures at rest in 2021, during the pandemic. On one hand, I see this work as a poetic act of resistance to the contemporary incentives of production, performance, and speed. It addresses the violence inflicted on our bodies and nervous systems by neoliberal, neocolonial patriarchy. We spend a stretched amount of time (3 hours), collectively, in a state that purposefully resists these incentives. On the other, I also see this piece as a very welcome oasis: a space that offers rest from a mode-of being that, for most of us, doesn’t really work; a time-space where we are allowed to try something else, together. As an oasis, Creatures at rest is less a performance or an aesthetic object than it is a practice, a lab, a process of experimentation and an experience for everyone involved.
The piece invites both performers and visitors to deeply involve all their senses, including the kinaesthetic perception of our bodies. It approaches perception—with all senses—as a conscious practice: as something we do, and something we can do in a variety of ways. Where narrow some modes of perception encourage instrumentalization, we look for a wide mode: one that fosters an awareness and affection for a wide range of things, beings, and phenomena. We try to see/look, feel/touch, hear/listen in a way that goes beyond differences between body and thing, living matter and non-living matter, air between bodies and the bodies themselves, a face and a hand, an audience member and a co-performer, a wall and a face. We slide into a molecular plane of experience where these distinctions simply don’t apply.
Creatures at rest inevitably creates intimacy and vulnerability. The work challenges performance spaces as places of public posing where vulnerability and intimacy are not shown. By exposing humans in a relaxed, slow quality, where the postures and masks we carry drop away, the work calls for an attitude of collective presence, care, and responsibility—and exposes the violence of our current social, political and economic realities that fail to call for such an attitude. The vulnerability of the people on the platform invites bystanders to a posture that is more accountable than pure aesthetic observation.”
Alice Van der Wielen-Honinckx
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