All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace

By Ezra Veldhuis and Bosse Provoost

Factual Description by: Henri Emmanuel Doublier

I like to think (and

the sooner the better!)

*of a cybernetic meadow *

where mammals and computers

live together in mutually

programming harmony

like pure water

touching clear sky.

I like to think

(right now please!)

of a cybernetic forest

filled with pines and electronics

where deer stroll peacefully

past computers

as if they were flowers

with spinning blossoms.

I like to think

(it has to be!)

of a cybernetic ecology

where we are free of our labors

and joined back to nature,

returned to our mammal

brothers and sisters,

and all watched over

by machines of loving grace.

(Richard Brautigan)

This poem sets the theme for the show. You can read it in the programme of the next festival before seeing it. I copy/paste it to contextualise this report.

Entrance to the audience lit by a neutral, diffused light from light tubes (Led)

We can see the stage and the set design:

-A white dance floor covering the entire stage with a small hill 1m high in the middle right of the stage, covered by the same white dance floor.

-A large curtain, 5m high and 10m long, forms a 90° angle and creates a corner, stage left, with a gradation of colours from green to white.

a large snake made of cables in warm colours, starting in the back of the public space and crossing it in the middle, running to the end of the stage and forming a sort of semi-circle.

-Five or six white plastic sculptures about 50 cm high, resembling brains, are linked by the giant snake of cables and form neural control points. Smoke billows from some of them, as if this machine had too much energy, like the energy around active volcanoes.

-A larger white plastic sculpture is integrated into the middle of the audience on the path of the snake, and it is from here that the dancers enter and begin the show, standing on this white sculpture, like an island in the audience. They slowly descend towards the stage.

-We can make out a giant arch made of 40 theatre lights running from the back left of the audience to the back right of the stage. And we will discover later that they are filtered in a naturalistic gradation from the cold day light to the orange-red of sunrise, representing the path of the sun.

Some of the lights in this arch begin to come to life, illuminating the stage and the dancers. The LED tubes in the audience slowly fade away.

The first part introduces us to this special world, a gentle ballet of light announces that this world has a life of its own, is not just there to illuminate the dancers and has a rhythm, a breath, a particular composition. And for me, the whole show is based on this word: composition.

The dance is quite calm, sensitive and naturalistic. Sometimes with significant actions. I would describe this dance as soft naturalism.

The dance is not demonstrative or catchy. It creates a coexistence between the humans and the huge installation.

The dancers repeatedly point to the lamps with their fingers to attract the audience’s attention.

They maintain a gentle relationship with each other and with the immense light installation that could crush them, or simply make them tiny. Several times they put their heads on the floor and stand upside down.

Sometimes they go behind the back curtain and come back with objects from our shared 70s science fiction culture.

A musical environment coming from the same field is well specialised, and softly transformed.

This music accompanies these actions and visual installations and gives a taste that feels both nostalgic and positive.

How can I analyse the lighting composition of the show?

After the beginning that I described, there are something like 4 or 5 moments of dance/light installation, creating a dramaturgical evolution up to a coloured sunrise in the smoke.

-Sometimes the light isn’t moving and just illuminates the dancers from a few lamps in the big arch and LED tubes.

-Sometimes the two coexist. The light is in soft movement and we are between the two in terms of perception. There are, for example, beautiful images of the dancers in back coloured light, plus smoke.

-Sometimes there’s interaction. There’s a recurring action in particular: the dancers face the end of the arch, back stage right, and with the same movement they trigger a fanciful little light sequence made up of the last lamps in the arch plus a stroboscopic impact.

-Sometimes the light takes all the attention.

The gentle ballet of light from the beginning returns, announcing the end of a sequence (but not always, as a kind of red herring).

There’s the led tubes solo.

There is the solo of the par64 of the arche. It is interesting to perceive the lights of the lamp themselves, and the light it creates on the floor, with the soft diffusion of the light and the subtile choice of the gradation of filters. There is a sensitive creation of movement and volume made with the change of intensities of the lamps.

There is an incredible sequence of moving shadows projected on the white floor, thanks to the led dimmable tubes in cold blue.

All that is pure visual art, giant installation at the scale of the theatre.

What is new in this show, is that Ezra and Bosse have been able to give space to moments of light, thanks to a remarquable dramaturgical balance between performance and installation.

This show is an utopia for the next generation of stage artist, All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace.