Jesper Just: Interpassivities
At moments, a map so detailed one could mistake it for a veritable landscape—at others, a virtual experience more tangible than reality itself. Entering the performance space, media and dimensions overlap and fold in on one another, drawing the viewer into a universe where it is impossible to distinguish the real from replica, and experience from illusion.
This spring Jesper Just, in collaboration with the Royal Danish Ballet, will present INTERPASSIVITIES, a performance exploring changes in space, labor, communication, and experience in the wake of contemporary society and technology.
Dancers and audience alike will navigate a shifting visual and sonic topographic landscape oscillating between the realms of interactive and interpassive human relations, and between the screen and live performance. The musical soundscape is performed as an encounter between the live instrument on stage and cinematic recordings of Kim Gordon, former bassist in the legendary band Sonic Youth. Furthermore the music appears like a structural element in the performance rather than a traditional accompaniment. As mediums and dimensions collide, the inherent boundaries and hierarchies between the real and the virtual are challenged: The contradiction between the real and the virtual is reversed and expanded, when the virtual is presented in live time and physical space, while reality becomes a rendering of experience.
Drawing influence from Jorge Luis Borges’ fable, “On Exactitude in Science” – in which a great empire created a map so detailed it was as large as the empire itself – the ballet serves as a contemporary analogy, creating a realm of representations whose underlying originals decay and change perspective. Invariably mapping a present.
Role: Dramaturg
March 9-31
Copenhagen
Royal Danish Theatre
