LOOKING FROM A WINDOW ABOVE

Jessica Guez


«The young lady, 1522, Cariani and I», a simultaneously minimal and baroque dance-painting, aspires to create a bodily relationship with some paintings (or their photographic reproductions), based on my imagination, as a spectator, aiming for the creation of an artistic form. This performance will be a gesture of appropriation and of love for painting, for art and for the works I will present in my own way. I want to develop a dance composed of simple gestures with a daily body that can sometimes appear more expressionist. It could happen in my bedroom but it will be visible and exposed.

 

Between the exhibition and the show, "Looking From a Window Above" draws inspiration from the various places where I develop my artistic practices: the bedroom, the studio, and the scene. It was born from a very simple desire: to dance with my paintings.

This piece materializes fantasies coming from inner and sometimes intimate places like memory and imagination. These fantasies or inner images also come from traditional and pop music, and works from the past, in particular an Italian baroque painting from 1522 (i.e. from its low-quality photographic reproduction).

I wish to share and promote forms of physical and personal relationship with artistic objects: from the poster in the bedroom to the painting in the museum. In exposing this intimacy on stage and at the same time as the exhibition of the paintings happens, I try to let the fragility and vulnerability - linked in part to the everyday, the human - circulate within the forces that are produced in the convention or cultural habit that is a show, an audience watching an artistic form.


Conception, choreography, interpretation, and images: Jessica Guez
Dramaturgy and artistic follow-up: Maša Tomšič and Bernardo Chatillon
Participating interpreter in the process: Xavier Ovídio
Supporters and co-productions: Self-Mistake, Temps d'Images Lisboa, ZOA Festival and DGArtes - Ministry of Culture of the Portuguese Republic.

Residencies: Honolulu-Nantes, Trust Collective, Companhia Portuguesa de Bailado Contemporâneo and Companhia Olga Roriz.

Acknowledgements: Nuno Bernardino, Delfim Sardo, Milton Pereira, Daniel Pizamiglio, David Marques, Marine Srvs, Elisa Pône, Rita Barreira, Nuno Marques and José-Maria & Marta