The Festival Temps d’Images recently brought Fabien Prioville’s solo piece, Jailbreak Mind, to the Merlin Theater. Prioville has worked with prestigious companies La La La Human Steps and the Wuppertal Tanztheater of Pina Bausch – known for their skilful and highly trained dancers, as well as their original, innovative approaches to performance creation.
Expectations then, are high, and the Merlin auditorium is packed. This piece not only promises a high performance standard, but also to bring into focus the thought provoking topic of how we relate to violence in the digital age. The inspiration apparently came from a news story about a man running amok in Tokyo.
Prioville worked on this performance in collaboration with the sound and media artist Frank Schulte and visual artist Uli Sigg, searching for a level on which images from computer games, electronic music and Prioville’s presence could meet on stage.
There are three sections of white wall stretching across the back of the white stage, onto which images are projected most of the time. The first part of the performance is the more abstract – the images are of not particularly recognizable structures, and Prioville explores mechanical, although still very human, movement. Perhaps the way the designer of a computer game tries to imagine the physical possibilities of his characters.
Eventually we come to a more direct level of communication. Prioville uses his clothing to cover his head, making himself simultaneously blind and invisible. During this section the images are also recognizable as images and characters from computer games. Prioville follows, observes, imitates and attempts to interact with the avatar – the character who represents the player in the game.
A long trail of images of people in a computer game being massacred by the player as they are walking along the street, lying asleep in bed or running away are played against the white walls of the backdrops. Prioville sits still among these images with his face covered, like the players who reject their identity when they play, thereby suspending moral responsibility and the socially accepted code that tells us none of us should really take pleasure in brutally destroying human lives.
These images are of course disturbing in themselves, but the fact that they come from the realm of ‘play’, and not ‘reality’ also gives them a laughable absurdity.
Prioville’s movement is very impressive and the choreography is stunning and searching. Whether the motivation is abstract or with defined intention, the piece seeks to express or explore bizarre processes of the mind, in a physical language created for only this purpose. This is dance at its most intellectual – it has the energy of thought, more than the energy of dance. It shows us how dance has possibilities beyond its aesthetic value, how it can be used as a tool to express something more abstract and non-physical.
Merlin Theater
1052 Budapest, Gerlóczy utca 4.