A Dizzy Perspective
Timm Knudsen,
Bodil Marie Thomsen
Résumé : In the performance Hvorfor bli’r det nat, mor (“Why does night come, Mother”) by Hotel Pro Forma, the spectator’s perspectivist view is the main actor. The eye is seldom allowed to rest in a sure sensing of all that is seen. The spectator’s feelings are not agitated; neither can the pictures generated shock anyone. The spectator is dizzy because the condition of delineation itself is shaken. The performance sets the scene architecturally for the eye’s unremitting oscillation between conceiving what is seen in a pictorial flat framework or in a spatial depth perspective. Hotel Pro Forma builds on choreographic experience from the Theatre of Images (Billedstofteatret), led by Kirsten Dehlholm from 1977 –1985. With the addition of Tomas Lahoda’s conceptual pictorial element, the performance becomes less expressive, but – especially as regards spatial scenography – much more audience-orientated and philosophically binding. The various visual experiments with perspectivist depth-surface effects have their scientific pendant in newer neurobiology and cognitive psychology; but on the artistic level it is a question of the eye’s relationship to the seen.