DANCE FILM - with choregrapher Daniel Dobbels and dancer Brigitte Asselineau

“This video was produced in the context of an intervention of Daniel Dobbels, choregrapher and Brigitte Asselineau, performer at the Fresnoy, in October 1998. The idea was to displace the choreography in a passage space and to, as doing the documentary interfere with this “danced-theory”. * This meeting-point became some kind of improvisation where everything is restituted without any cuts. I tried to take the shape of a theory that was very far from my own vision and often even unbearable to me. My conduct line was the body, or at least the body that was constituting itself during the elaboration of this video.”

V. Briggs. November 1999.Tourcoing.

The device was very precise, as the idea was to create a real meet-point between the performers (performers here, meaning the dancer, the cello player, the two people filming): as D. Dobbels held a mini-DV and myself an Hi 8 camera, we filmed the same duration that is totally made restitution of in the editing. Brigitte Asselineau was to dance in the bar of the Fresnoy during the open hours of the cinema interfering herself with the public flow leaving the cinema, and Sara Millot was to play cello WITH or WITHOUT the music pre-established by D. Dobbels (Bob Dylan).

This was less a provocation than questioning the ability of filming something that for very subjective reasons did not invite me to film. The idea of digging a pumpkin came later on as a mental space, in which I was isolated during the shooting; it came as a virus infiltrating itself, as an irritating repetition. In D. Dobbels demonstration, the sick body is considered as a possibility for creation and a possible path in contemporary dance, even necessary after a century marked by the holocaust. I tried to follow this idea, but refused the negation of life it could lead to. The sound of birds singing, nearly unbearable insists on this affirmation.

Daniel Dobbels is known in France for his writings about dance and dance theory responding to post-war trauma of the body.

Credits :

Produced by Le Fresnoy, National Studio for Contemporary Arts. France.
Dance performed by Brigitte Asselineau.
Music chosen by Daniel Dobbels: Bob Dylan.
Cello performed during the process of the shooting by Sara Millot.
Images shot of the pumpkin: Keja Ho Kramer.
Pumpkin digging by Vanessa Briggs.
Images of the dance-performance by D. Dobbels and V. Briggs
Editing by Vanessa Briggs and Laurent Debever.
Directed by Vanessa Briggs.