Maps Santoro & Godard

“We very soon got to six yards to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile. And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!” “Have you used it much?” I enquired. “It has never been spread out, yet,” said Mein Herr: “The farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.” Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded

(1893) The Franco-American duo Liz Santoro and Pierre Godard began working together in 2011 on a project programmatically titled “The Uncertainty Principle.” In a logical succession, each new piece they make is envisioned as continuing from the point reached by the preceding one. They refer to these works as “machines” or “measuring instruments” but there is no notion of war or Stakhanovite forced labor here, not metrical formatting. Rather, in these constantly renewed pieces dance, text, music and sets work with movement and speech to probe the cognitive issues involved in any performative act. Liz Santoro learned classical dance at the Boston Ballet School and then studied neurosciences at Harvard before a spell at the Trisha Brown School in New York. Since that time, she has worked with various choreographers including Alexandra Bachzetsis, Philipp Gehmacher, Trajal Harrell and Eszter Salamon & Christine De Smedt. She started collaborating closely with Godard in 2009. So far, the multitalented Frenchman has been a financial analyst, a lighting designer, a prop man and a production assistant, and he is currently doing automatic language processing research in a project documenting disappearing languages. Together, they are exploring the endless, complex connections between performed movement linguistics, scientific theory and astronomy. The duo began with site-specific pieces in museums and gardens, such as Watch It (2012) and Quarte (2014). We Do Our Best (2012), Relative Collider (2014) and For Claude Shannon (2016) were all conceived for the theater, that archetypal space of representation which is an architectural space first of all, in which every tangible and impalpable element counts. To understand what is at stake in Maps, supported by New Settings, we need—given the continuity of their work—to go back to the works that came before it,. First performed in March 2014 and performed (among other venues) at the Théâtre de la Bastille and Théâtre de Vanves in Paris, at the Chocolate Factory in New York, then back in Paris at the CDC Atelier de Paris Carolyn Carlson, Relative Collider presented the interactions of a quartet constructing and deconstructing meaning via a kind of organic chemistry, all before witnesses. The meaning of the words and movements, generated in parallel in the same space and entering into fusion, was experienced in a “physics of attention, a collision of gazes.” For Claude Shannon (2016) started with a speech by IT pioneer Claude Shannon, from which was extracted a linguistic structure capable of generating choreographic sequences ad infinitum. For each new performance, the dancers had to learn a particular choreography selected from the billions of possibilities: no two performances could be the same. Bringing into play the resources of work memory and long-term me- mory, the four performers presented their inner scores in a black and white set, creating a sense of cumulative tension which was shared by spectators, who themselves were dragged into this “memory machine.” All Santoro and Godard’s pieces invite a direct response from the audience. The spectators watch the performers watching them and the event probes the effects of this “being watched” on the nervous system. The audience is again at the heart of Maps, not as participants but as receivers of the visible and invisible signals sent out by the interactions between the performers both on the stage and in resonance with the entire building. By each exploiting their full span to the score by Greg Beller, the bodies of the six dancers (Matthieu Barbin, Lucas Bassereau, Jacquelyn Elder, Maya Masse, Cynthia Koppe and Charlotte Siepiora) become unites of measurement and intermediaries between the spoken text and movement made visible. The idea is simple and has been known since Antiquity: each human brain is a complex structure housing both language and memory, sounds and images. It is up to us to locate and invoke them. Now, this matrix has properties that are both shared and singular. During a given experience, our neurons both follow identical patterns and create variants. By taking as its structure the cortex itself, Maps offers an evolving cartography. As we know, any map has only a limited grip on the reality of its territory: it simply proposes a measured transcription, without having the capacity to communicate information that is difficult to quantify and yet decisive: the strength of the wind, the nature of the soil, sunlight. By starting from two tangible sources that are the representation of the cortex, and the Al-Tusi couple (Al-Tusi was an eminent philosopher, mathematician, astronomer and theologian living in Persia in the twelfth century), in which a small circle rotating inside a larger circle with twice its diameter produces a seemingly non-uniform movement in what is a kinetic illusion, Santoro and Godard and their dancers offer an unsettling sideways step. Maps overturns the codes of perception of the active witnesses that we become simply via the chemistry of our brain. Codes inscribed in an order that only disorder, with all its rigor, is capable of calling into question.

“Structure without life is dead but life without structure is unseen”

John Cage

Marcelline Delbecq is an artist and writer. Liz Santoro & Pierre Godard Duo formé en 2009. Vivent et travaillent à Paris. Dernières créations : 2012 Watch It ; We Do Our Best 2014 Quarte Relative Collider 2016 For Claude Shannon