Reproducing Move
This short film reflects on the experience of working as a performer in the Exhibition MOVE : Choreographing You.
An anglo-german production, MOVE was first presented at the Hayward Gallery, in London and was later hosted by the Haus Der Kunst in Munich during the course of 2010-11.
The film is a phenomenological take on the art works displayed within the exhibition, by presenting the viewer with a series of environments.
On screens left and right Tatge often presents the same art works, running in parallel, within the two different gallery contexts of Hayward Gallery (screen left) and Haus Der Kunst (screen right). In the middle screen, Tatge presents us with recordings of the piece PRODUCTION by Xavier Le Roy and Marten Spangberg.
The piece PRODUCTION commissioned by Hayward curator Stephanie Rosenthal specifically for the exhibition involved a group of seventeen performers, rotating three at a time, in shifts of three to four hours a day.
PRODUCTION revolved around the idea of work and labor, pushing the boundaries of what is performance by presenting the visitor with a dilemma: in a gallery, surrounded by inanimate objects how differently do I interact with a human being, and in fact, do I interact differently?
Another key question of the work was the production of knowledge in a product- based society: What do we mean by product? What if our job is to work in a gallery, reproducing dances that will never be shown as a finished product? Lastly, what do we define as being work and or pleasure?
By posing a provocation, the visitor is lured into looking at the performers reproducing pieces of dances from IPods in the middle of the gallery. Once the visitor’s gaze towards the performers is established, the performers stop dancing and interact with the visitor on a verbal level. As the conversation progresses, the gap between visitor and performer is breached.
As both parties become more comfortable with one another, the conversation
gradually comes to a close and the performers go back to reproducing dances, whilst the visitor continues his/her tour of the exhibit.
In 'Reproducing Move', Tatge allows us a way into the “private moments” of PRODUCTION, a chance to see the dancers work on the dances they chose, for more than an instant. Here the performers do not stop to converse with the camera, they continue their job undisturbed. The viewer is then allowed to take in the process that goes behind the work PRODUCTION. He/she becomes the invisible visitor that the performers are not aware of, or a chameleon that has blended into the background.
By acquiring the low quality video material from the technology used in PRODUCTION, Tatge triggers a chain of events: the dancer is now reproducing dancers that are, in turn, reproducing dances, utilising an integral part of the exhibition to document the exhibition itself.