Catastrophe Communication Combinatoria
Palle Dyrvall / Caroline Hainaut
Brysselbaserade Palle Dyrvall och Caroline Hainaut har skapat en slags enmanskonferens där en kostymklädd man ihärdigt reflekterar över den kaotiska världen omkring honom. Hans ord får styrkan av muskler och hans rörelser omvandlas till ett övertygande föredrag. Svenskfödde Palle Dyrvall när sedan länge ett intresse för utforskande improvisation. Det ledde honom till Belgien, där han har sin konstnärliga bas och bl.a. samarbetat med Les Ballets C de la B och Jan Fabre. Samarbetet med Caroline Hainaut inleddes när han var i residens på Movement Research i New York och idén till CCC föddes på ett Dunkin´ Donuts-café där.
Föreställningen genomfördes med stöd av STUK och Leuven.
Sverigeturné våren 2008 genom Turnéslingan Tre Scener, där den visades tillsammans med Susanne Martins Herr K Müh i programmet Susanne Martin & Palle Dyrvall delar kväll.
INTERVIEW with PALLE DYRVALL
by Michiel Soete
> You were born in Sweden, where exactly.
I was born in a small town, Kumla, where I grew up and then I moved to Stockholm and stayed there for about ten years. I also studied at the Swedish Ballet School in Stockholm, not at the Classical Dance department, but at the Modern Dance department. And of course I still had some classical dance training there and the modern dance was very classical as well, you know. But I was curious about contemporary dance, and ones I discovered it I thought that “This is what I want to do”.
> You went immediately to this Dance School after you left college?
No, I studied two years of Economics, but I quit this in the beginning of the third year. And that was a good choice, because in Sweden you can’t start another bachelor after you graduated in one bachelor, so luckily I stopped and started to dance. I had already studied the basics of dance, so I could start straightaway. And I also went to an ordinary school at the same place, where I followed some global courses.
> And after this education you started to work with the Efva Lilja Dancecompany.
Sure, for three years. And I was also doing some things by myself. So I worked with Evfa Lilja, but it was not exactly my type of work. I was happy in the company though for about two years, but especially the third year I did not like it anymore. But I had a job, I earned some money, I could dance and however, I learned a lot.
> You learned to walk on vertical walls.
That’s true. I also performed under water and I liked that a lot. The performances were sight-specific projects, but that didn’t always work: it had no sense to make a performance in a forest and to drop it afterwards in a supermarket, or on a square in the city. It lost something when we played it in a gallery and for me the original performance was interesting but when we did it over, it didn’t go that well.
> Were you just performing the ideas of the director, like a pawn in a chess
game or not?
No, there is always a personal input, in everything you do, always. But from whatever I have done since, she was the most directing, that is true.
> You said you still worked on your own performances at the same time. So what kind of performances did you make.
Mainly I worked at the school where I had studied, I went back to create with students there. I also danced with people I knew, and made some things on my own.
> And then you came to Belgium. Why? Were you attracted to the dance-culture here?
Yeah, but I didn’t know that much about it. I knew Wim Vandekeybus for sure, I definitely knew Jan Fabre. Maybe it was mostly because of Jan Fabre that I came to Belgium. I told myself: “I go to the country of Jan Fabre!” I also read an article about Les Ballets C. de la B. and in that same magazine I found an ad for an audition.
And then, in fact, you passed the audition.
Yes, so I went to the workshop, where I made a complete ass of myself. Hans Van Den Broeck said that I wasn’t open-minded enough, but I think Rasmus Ölmen (another Swedish Dancer, working in Belgium) convinced him and told him that I was okay.
And then one day you finally worked with Jan Fabre.
I knew Jan Fabre a bit by then, so I could go to the workshop immediately and he said he wanted to work with me. So I played in Parrots and Guinea Pigs, and I would have wanted to continue workning with him, but then they cancelled a part of the tour and so suddenly I had nothing to do. I also didn’t play in the retake of Je Suis Sang, that would have been the next thing. And so it has been a long time that we haven’t seen each other and so yeah... But it was a very nice experience, and he is a very good director and you learn a lot from him, a good way of working, interesting feedbacks. So I hope I can still work with him again.
And then you went to the so-called Movement Research Centre in New York.
That was a scholarship I got in Sweden, to develop my dance-language.
So you didn’t have to make a real performance at the end?
I did some performances in Judson Church, I don’t know if you know Judson Church, it is a place for dance, a beautiful place. It is a church, but they made it completely empty. It’s a nice place to perform. It is open on Mondays, so if you go to New York you can visit it, it’s free or you pay three dollars for a performance.
Was it there that you met Caroline Hainaut?
No, I had met her in Belgium before. But I couldn’t find good dancers in New York so we decided she would come and join me at Movement Research. New York is a good place but people have two jobs or more. It is difficult to get them together to rehearse on normal hours. So I thought I’d ask Caroline to come over, and she came over and we worked together for five months. That went really well.
After your work in New York you made some other performances together with Caroline. In Antwerp for example.
Yeah. “Geoffrey Chauser’s first date”. That was a pretty difficult experience, a difficult creation, I had a lot of illusions about creating and dancing. But it was a good lesson; I said to myself that for the next creation, I needed to prepare the work a lot better! It was a necessary experience, we learned it the hard way, you know. We had a lot of time, but things go like they go.
Was this performance already a study for Catastrophe Communication Combinatoria?
Well, there where talking and dancing sure, but it had nothing to do with CCC. It was a solo and it had some good parts and some bad parts. It is normal to make some bad things and then to learn from it and make it better in the next performance.
And then you made Catastrophe Communication Combinatoria... How did you work together? You wrote this text together?
We wrote a bit in New York for the first time. We saw a man in a bar in New York that inspired us, and this man was the start for the performance. But it took us years before we brought it together. And then for the festival KlapStuk in Leuven, we developed it into ten minutes, during a three week working period. Then we were invited to play in Vienna so we where given another six weeks of studio space in the STUK and we made it to thirty-five minutes, because that was the timeframe we where given by the festival. If they had given us a full evening, we would had made it one hour... It was a nice start, we had our ideas, there was a lot of nice material, the text was good and Caroline is very clever with texts and a very good director as well.
You wrote the text first or you developed it through the creation?
We had a page for the ten minutes in Leuven after that it was a big work to extend it from ten minutes to thirty-five, because all choices where possible. So we decided to stick the character because he was the centre of the performance. How would he act, how would he speak, what would be important for him, what would he say and what would not be possible. And we tried to find the ‘macro’ to explain the ‘micro’. But we couldn’t make the character speak continually for thirty-five minutes like that, because then one would got quite bored, or overcharged. In a sense it was a really easy production, we did not have a lot of weight on us from the production side, we just did our thing and did not have to write a dossier two years in advance and explain exactly what we wanted to do . When you are an artist with a personal piste, I think this is possible: you know how to work, what you like and what you always do. But when you’re not an established artist, like us, it is not easy to explain first and to make afterwards.
