"There is no end to more" Jeremy Wade

Accueil > Manga2 > There is no end to more

"THERE IS NO END TO MORE"

JEREMY WADE (US/D)

Presentation

Pictures & Movies

Interview

Background, Cast and Crew

Price, duration

Dance

5. 6. 8. 9. 10 FEBRUARY 2010

at 9pm (no performance on the 7th)

Jeremy Wade, a New-York born choreographer now based in Berlin, has invented over several dance shows a very singular way to use the body, which is sharp, expressionist, and intense. This time, he went all the way into the world of Japanese kawaii to find a new way to dance. An array of visual sources - vociferating monsters, vivid phantasmagorias - modifies and drives the visual universe of this production. Wade will pursue his musical experimentation with Brendan Dougherty, who plays live his electronic music. He also worked in partnership with a Japanese illustrator to blur the colours of the piece until they vanish.

See the synopsis(pdf in french/53kb)

See the flyer (pdf in french/1.6mb)

See the poster (pdf in french/ 438kb)

See press book (pdfin french/1mb)

See teaching aids (pdf in french/ 864kb)

In residence: 22 Oct - 19 Nov 2009 & 1-10 Feb 2010

“Babel” : Meeting with the artist Mon 8 March after the performance

“Chantier” : Wed 18 Nov at 7:30pm

KAWAII

Kawaii in Japanese means "cute". In manga and anime, kawaii characters have big eyes, a small nose and a small mouth, and childlike expressions (see Hello Kitty, Pikachu...). By-products and accessories of these characters are extremely popular in Japan and they are everywhere in the Japanese culture.

Why are you interested in the cute (“kawaii”) aspect of manga culture?

Jeremy Wade : Kawaii in Japanese means cute and it represents a huge global consumerist trend producing everything from comics to films to toys to toothbrushes. Japanese manga and kawaii culture is probably the most articulate cultural mass-phenomenon of grotesque body conceptions. Kawaii represents a fantastic, super cosy and infantile utopia. When taken out of context it can look pretty terrifying. I am also interested in how Kawaii serves as a mass escapist form for a culture dominated by tradition, consumerism and stress. The world of Kawaii is fantastic for echoing one of the major themes in my work, which is juxtaposing various aesthetic ideals/behaviors to address how close the opposites are, to blur the boundaries: beauty and disgust, innocence and violence, laughing and crying etc, etc. Having said that, the piece will still be cute and fucked up but my primary fascination shifted from Kawaii to There is no end to more….. or the absolute excess, vertigo, void, never ending options that dominates our fast paced societies. Man in relation to the untenable.

Your last pieces were very embodied, there is no end to more will be totally different. Can you explain your choice?

There is continuity in the development from piece to piece slowly adding different elements/working methods to the pieces. I want to make sure I do not know what I am doing otherwise there is no challenge. I am trying to push my self personally into unchartered space. […] My next piece will definitely be more cerebral than previous experiments. Your imagination will hopefully run a marathon in this next piece. We share the hallucination with the audience projecting it on the frontal lobe of their brains.

This piece will work with a lot of virtual material. Can you explain this choice?

We play with projecting illustration and animation in a strange crushed architectural space. We play with black and white line drawing created by Hiroki Outska. The illustration will work in and out of synchrony with the performance. We use it as a comment support as well as to disturb the actions on stage. Hiroki is actually a famous Manga illustrator and he can draw absolutely anything. This is terrifying due to the sheer options but also fun. Having spent a month in Japan I became fascinated with the totality of illustration and animation. Kawaii is everywhere, in Tokyo the police are represented by a squirrel. I like to navigate this irrationality, and play with reinventing and rewriting various fixed forms by turning them into cartoons. The blurring of boundaries between the real and the virtual is a subsequent fact of the aesthetics of Kawaii. What happens when you put eyes on a toilet seats and it starts to say actual important sincere things? This performance is about the total bombardment of concrete objects stripped of their context via text, via video and animation, via sound, via the body. There is no end to more...