Vrouwenvouwen
'Vrouwenvouwen' means: to fold women / women's folds
choreography: Charlotte Vanden Eynde
Press
De Standaard (B), 21/2/00
Volumes have been written about the relationship between body and mind, and one theory tumbles over the other. It's something else if, like Charlotte Vanden Eynde, one creates images with those bodies - in this case female bodies - on a stage. They reveal in a concrete way issues that remain theoretically spoken unresolvable. [...]
In 'Vrouwenvouwen' five, six, seven themes are superimposed to form highly intriguing images. [...]
The performance is bounded by powerful, self-contained opening and closing images.[...]
Between beginning and end the scenes always show something of the splendour and misery of the (female) body, of those moments when it goes its own way and those when it is aware that it is being observed and judged. It's a montage of material 'written on the body' of each dancer. [...]
The performance is full of images in which latent sensations (which are not therefore any less important) come suddenly to the surface. They are often of an almost didactical value, in that they illustrate a certain state of body and mind. This is not done without humour, even with comical moments, but the general tenor is not cheerful. The female body is here something worrisome, not to be taken for granted. [...]
De Morgen (B), 26/2/00
[...] 'Benenbreken' and 'Vrouwenvouwen' are a kind of statement of principles by the choreographer to the world. It seems as if she is providing a screen through which to look at her work.
[...] an exposition of principles Vanden Eynde wants to examine and which she works in 'Vrouwenvouwen': the disarticulation and reintegration of the body and its parts, as well as its cultural characteristics, the connection between symmetry and fragmentation, a sideways glance at femininity. [...]
Vanden Eynde's investigation concentrates here on the notion of 'woman', as a piece of origami paper folded in all directions. [...] At the beginning, for example, she sits at the front of the stage in a white wedding dress. Suddenly she takes out a pair of scissors and makes several deep cuts in the dress. Then, as if they were Caesarean sections, she takes out all manner of 'female' objects, including a comb. A powerful image and an announcement that the performance is an investigation of all sorts of feminine attribute. [...]
For example, Vanden Eynde examines the boundary between the body and the robot or doll, and between the front and the back of a body. The dancers' bodies no longer always seem to be independent entities, but literally dance into each other, entwine and almost merge. At some moments you only see four heads of hair, eight legs, or four pairs of breasts.[...]
One thing is for sure: the choreographer knows where she wants to go and chooses precisely those instruments with which she wants to set to work. Let her work consist of still unpolished diamonds, yet they shine a little.
Preview - Tijd Cultuur (B), 16/2/00
In 'Benenbreken', 'Zij Ogen' and 'Vrouwenvouwen', the young choreographer Charlotte Vanden Eynde has made three remarkable pieces. [...]
Rather than dancing, Vanden Eynde expressively stages many of the body's ambiguities. In so doing she does not shun vulnerability and ugliness; the margins have their own charm, swinging between aestheticism and eroticism. [...]
Vanden Eynde does not wish to seek out the margins in order to shock; the combination of ugliness and vulnerability has its charm:
'Each person, each body has some ugliness, a body is not only beautiful. I want to show a border between things. Between beautiful and ugly, beween seriousness and laughter.
Always showing two sides and yet remaining balanced, without compromise.'
The body provokes the formation of even more borders, since it is ambiguous at all times: matter and image, flesh and carrier of identity, external and internal, natural and constructed, you name it. One can never call it a unity, because the body is always two, or rather a multiplicity. Minor excesses and imbalances may occur. Vanden Eynde seems to be concerned with an appraisal of the body's ambiguity:
'There is the flesh, as a casing, and on the other hand everything that happens inside. A body always speaks in a particular way. When you look at someone you always make associations. I want the dancers to remain transparent as people, to keep the life inside them; they don't have to become just an expressive form. Sometimes you see a person merge into a form, after which the person reappears; that is fascinating.' [...]
The body is absorbed into many-layered questions of identity, and a series of themes related to femininity: a woman's relationship with her body, motherhood and so on. First playfully, then compulsively, numerous elements are accumulated that make the whole less readable, that clear away clichés and stimulate a mysterious atmosphere. Once again Vanden Eynde speaks of 'being split, I won't say schizophrenic. Because the mind itself isn't a unity either, and I want to express this physically. Being childlike as opposed to feminine or being grown-up, and playful as against graveness. I show it all, but as if something were not quite right.' [...]
For such ingenious playing with all sorts of opposites, all in some way leading back to the body, Vanden Eynde finds inspiration in the contemporary visual arts. Being the daughter of an artist (her mother), she was 'provided' with it from childhood on. She admires Marina Abramovic, Louise Bourgeois, Rebecca Horn, Frida Kahlo and Cindy Sherman, and that is visible in her work. [...]