Alain Platel’s mapping of “anotherness” in Out of Context - for Pina by Coman Poon

We are animals. Language is wild.


“Us” absorbs “them”, and “another” is in some way like us even while it is different.


Blindness is an essential element of knowledge.


The performer dies in order to give value to that which has been degraded and rendered profane.


The witness gives value to the sacred by co-creating a privileged moment of communal unity.


I was recently reminded of these elements of “anotherness” upon being introduced to Alain Platel’s les ballets C de la B, which launched both the National Arts Centre’s fall dance season in Ottawa and Harbourfront Centre’s World Stage 2010/11 season in Toronto with their ecstatic new work Out of Context - for Pina, aptly dedicated to the late German dancer/choreographer Pina Bausch.


In contrast to earlier works by this celebrated Belgian dance theatre troupe, Out of Context - for Pina opens with a minimally adorned stage: two lone microphones on stands and a wash of white light across an empty stage. Like a performance installation, we are left to stare into and contemplate this theatrical stillness in context of our expectations of performance. A lone woman emerges from amidst the audience, climbs up onto and crosses upstage and stands with her back to the audience. She methodically sheds her attire until she is standing in undergarments and, in a choreographic homage to Pina Bausch’s unveiling of the theatrical “fourth wall” in the seminal Kontakthof, turns around and walks downstage to present herself to our gaze. In overlapping sequence, each of the performers repeat this framing ritual, ending by seductively draping and shifting their disrobed bodies beneath the plush of a uni-form red blanket.

Tonight’s dance-theatrical contract is intimated: experiences, and not stories per se, will be staged on these performers’ bodies. Each performer turns around and looks directly out at us, the audience, inviting us to straddle this liminality. What is the experiential fine line between voyeurism ; exhibitionism, passion and pathology, poignancy and indictment, escapism and realism, fiction and biography? Out of Context - for Pina intentionally plays with these considerations by collapsing the boundaries between audience and performer, psyche and body, human nature and culture.

In looking to reveal what is hidden, and to inquire about our connections and differences as human animals, Alain Platel employs dramaturgical strategies to simultaneously implicate our bodies and personas as both object and subject. Through this self-conscious labyrinth of mirrors, we are invited to gaze inwardly and outwardly at the refractions between our individual and collective yearnings.

As individuals as well as part of a collective, we all bring our own experience -our thoughts, imaginations, feelings and responses- to what we see, hear and sense. Through a language of expressionistically vocal, writhing and gesticulating bodies, Out of Context - for Pina suggests that beneath the surface of difference, humans are self-aware animals uniquely united through tears, wounds and the transgression of boundaries. The canvas of our common humanity is sewn with communal experiences of loss, sacrifice, love and ecstasy. As Pina Bausch might say, this is the source of our greatest joy and trepidation.

Coman Poon  is an interdisciplinary artist-activist who integrates a multi-modal live art background, a long-time social and environmental justice activist practice, and training as an arts-informed coach and therapist to create a unique hybrid collaborative practice. With Erica Mott (Chicago, USA), he co-founded re[public] in/decency, an experiential think tank that explores the trans-national intersections between performance, social justice activism and arts-informed pedagogy. Read more!