A 2-Dimensional Stance

My first feeling after seeing Fleur Elise Noble was frustration: despite using the depth of the CCA space to create a three dimensional screen for her agitated, stop-motion films and the creator addressing her puppet cast with the hilarious admonition “I’ve asked you so many times not to burn the set down,” the 2-Dimensional Life of Her never fully emerged from Noble’s frantic, scribbled images. Incoherence and disassociation, obviously intended but difficult to engage with, was only resolved when the performer – clad in white paper and desperately clapping herself – invited the audience to leave.

Two days later, Catherine Diverres picks up on the use of depth perception and screens in STANCE 11, a fragmented and ghostly choreography for four. STANCE 11 had an immediacy, an evocation recreation of lost geometries inspired by the art of Oscar Schlemmer, the German expressionist and choreographer. While STANCE 11 abandons narrative more comprehensively, and flickers between allusive, abstract tableaux, it reflects back on 2-Dimensional Life and provides much needed clues to Noble’s surreal animation.

By presenting awkward geometry, characters suspended on screens or, in the case of STANCE, swimming through the air, both works suspend the expected laws of gravity: the emphasis on picaresque episodes undermines the usual lineal narrative. Time and space are replaced by fleeting glimpses, articulating ideas that are struggling to be expressed. STANCE and 2-Dimensional Life struggle with concepts about the impact of art, admittedly ambiguous, not fully formed, and certainly beyond direct verbal expression. It is imaginative programming that connects the two pieces, bringing STANCE’s beauty to bear on the dissipated energy of 2-Dimensional Life.

Ultimately, Noble’s intent remains opaque, like the faces of her illustration, beneath the scribbles of ink and behind the layered screens, yet the sequences of puppets floating away on a make-shift boat or a human woman frantically rubbing a flat surface that cleans up into a room, hint at an artist trying to scrub clean the layers of perception that cloud direct experience. STANCE 11, thanks to an intrusive soundtrack- including Radiohead and white noise – and coherent bursts of contemporary choreography – focuses more directly on remembering and reenergising Schlemmer’s personal artistic vision.

Unsurprisingly for New Territories, the impact is disquieting. Despite the surrealism of STANCE, which features a man in a bra deconstructing burlesque in broad gestures, a welder, a glimpse of a glamorous red dress and a rotating ball that is at once orbiting planet and looming wrecking ball, its ethereal beauty makes the applause easier.