The French performance artist Bastien Dausse built the ‘contemporary circus company’ Compagnie Barks around his abiding ‘desire to play with gravity’. This reality-bending video features two performances from Compagnie Barks’s show Moon / Cabinet de curiosités lunaires (2022). In the first, titled la bascule (or the seesaw), Dausse secures the French performance artist Julieta Salz into a weighted device he invented to simulate the gravity of the Moon, which is one-sixth of Earth’s. Dausse, still bound by the pull of our planet, then assists Salz as she moves through a series of transfixing acrobatic movements. In the second, titled la Table et chaises (or the Table and chairs), Dausse and Salz move across a set of a table and two chairs, with each object having only two legs affixed to the ground, all set against a forest background. Each of these performances juxtaposes the rules of our everyday world with elements that seem to challenge them, encouraging viewers to reconsider the familiar.
Dance showed me the untapped power of our attention muscle
Through tango, I sharpened attentional skills that make any moment richer. But these can be honed on or off the dancefloor
by Sara Melzer
