In SNOW CLOUD, tears never dry out. With traces and reverberations : the eyes are wet and the bodies are still shaken and inhabited by jolts, hiccups, breaths and lamentations. Visceral dispositive is thus one in which the expression of affect is reduced to essential materiality beyond psychological or emotional motivation. As such bodies of the performers are devoid of stage characterization and role playing. Their gestural score is affective and intense yet it is purified in order to reach ceremonial, technical and practical efficiency of a “lamenting machines”. In a tradition of professional mourners they are dwelling in a zone where pure simulacrum – fake tears – generate a visceral outlet for a sharing of a real grief. Bodies on stage are material conduits through which catharsis is ritualistically offered to a community. Performance is presented not to be decoded or interpreted but rather experienced in a direct affinity, across bodies.

Visceral simulacrum of mourning needed to be accompanied, framed and amplified by all the other elements of a dispositive. We imagined this generative coexistence between mediums of dance, voices, space/light and music as an evolving ecosystem which allow both for an autonomy of each “species” in it, and their balanced and fluid codependency. The aim was to find a dramaturgical balance and infinite hybridizations between the seductive and spectacular power of audio-visual performances and the intimate qualities offered by the somatic and vocal performance of the bodies on stage.

What interests us here, are the devices of simulacra put in play to channel the expressions of the pain and their allegorical forces. We wonder: is it still possible to embody and represent pathos when our contemporaneity opposes all vulnerability and glorifies only productivity? What do these trembling bodies caught in lights and sounds tell us? Is there, in the vulnerable and tense bodies of these inconsolable people, a saving force, a power or a resistance to the world that we should appreciate and understand now? 

SNOW CLOUD allows us to become witnesses of infinite hybrid combinations, between body, music and technology, which have now become an allegory of the need for change in our time.  

 Guillaume Marie