Traveling Olga / Traveling Gilles 2003, is a diptych which takes La Ribot’s previous experiments with corps-opèrateur , a hand-held video camerawork and the single take, (see here Pa amb tomàquet, 2000, and Despliegue, 2001) in a new, more explicitly choreographic direction. It presents two single, unedited four-minute takes filmed in each case with a camera that’s hand-held by the performer. La Ribot directs solo performances by dancers and choreographers Olga Mesa and Gilles Jobin. These two films are the fruit of intensive collaboration: filming, reviewing, and filming again with changes and corrections, each shoot ran to five days and at least thirty takes. In each film the strategy is the essentially the same, but applied to two very different dancing subjects in two contrasting locations, it leads to diverse results.
The locations were chosen for their resonance with each performer. Olga Mesa, who hails from rainy Asturias, dances in a cold, wet, wintry English garden; clad in a jarringly jolly striped jumper and shorts, she lurches around the muddy lawn, then collapses by the door of a shed, her bare legs scratched and spattered with grass and dirt. Gilles Jobin tests out a precise choreographic plan in a purpose-built set designed to push the hand-held camera’s spatial ambiguities to the limit. Its walls and floor are lined with self-consciously cheesy photo-murals of woods, alpine lakes and mountains, but as the camera “flies” across them they become a richly-coloured box of spatial tricks: a blue lake turns into sky and autumnal forest trees become a carpet to be walked over.
The wistful pop-classic Entr’acte to Act III of Carmen by Bizet plays in both episodes, its slightly syrupy woodwind tones striking an ironic note and injecting a quality of false reassurance into the proceedings. This uncertain mood chimes perfectly with the disorientations of the mobile, hand-held camera, which looks by turns both with and at the performer’s body. Sometimes it seems the dancer’s ally and an extension of their conscious activities. At other times it is an unreliable, even persecutory demiurge – a nosy, intrusive law unto itself, and a challenge to the whole idea of a neat division between “objective” and “subjective” cinematography.
Diptych Traveling Olga/ Traveling Gilles. 2003
Duration: 4mi. Written and Directed: La Ribot. Corps-opérateurs: Olga Mesa/ Gilles Jobin. Music: Opera Carmen by Bizet (Entre Act III)Video. Mastering: Angel Zoido. Technical Assistant: Daniel Miracle Production Manager: Eduardo Bonito and Jo Hughes. Produced by 36 Gazelles-La Ribot, London, with the support of Arts Council England. An Artsadmin associated project.
Journées de danse suisse contemporaine - Base Camp
In_ter_va_lo — Sala Cajasol
La Bâtie Festival de Genève
– Villa Bernasconi