ODC : odyssey

The first practice was born during a residency in Wolfsburg, at the festival Kunst in der Porschestraße. The parachute from our piece FEEDING BACK was taken for a walk outside and turned the urban esplanade into a windy communion. Once unfolded, the object inflates with the slightest breeze, takes off and becomes a large kite, a giant jellyfish, a floating brain or a sail. A group of dancers guides it, exploring cooperation and adaptability to the whims of the wind without words. Choreographed by the wind, they follow their impulses in response to this ever-changing, hypnotic shape. Once the unwritten rules are established, the audience may step in too: dancing with the cloth, sailing along, or even taking over control of the object.

Dancers enter into dialogue with the works of an exhibition. Each dancer chooses a work and answers it with their body: intuitively, intensely, sometimes with humour, sometimes with grief. The answer travels on through the group, and each new response changes the one before, like a feedback running from body to body. Every dancer holds a different place in this chain, and the places keep changing.

It was first performed at the closing of Examples to Follow – Explorations in Aesthetics and Sustainability in Berlin, an exhibition whose works faced difficult questions about the state of our world. In front of the model of a solar-powered electric chair, one dancer sang "Non, je ne regrette rien". Before shovels forged from the metal of guns, another danced a memorial ritual. Beside a blue fountain made of walking sticks, a third simply became a mermaid. This is where the tension lies: in the dancers' capacity to empathise with each work and with the social, cultural and environmental context it comes from, to honour it and to question it.

Visitors walk freely through the exhibition and follow the dancers from work to work, with curiosity, with complicity, sometimes with surprise. Many look at the works differently afterwards. The dancers' phones record each response, so the exhibition is documented through the eyes of the performance. Towards the end, the phones turn into mirrors for the performers themselves.

The same practice can answer any place – in Berlin it also responded to a garden – but it unfolds best among artworks. Unready Made #2 can be invited to other exhibitions, and the recorded material can grow into a film of the exhibition and its responses.

Four dancers watch a fifth. Their attention alone can be enough to set something in motion: the dancer whose turn it is begins, and the others follow, support, carry and extend the movement. The soloist becomes their conductor.

For the one in the centre, it can be a moment of empowerment: to be fully seen, to lead, to be held by a whole group. For the others, it is a practice of care and attentive listening, of putting themselves entirely at the service of someone else's dance. The mood shifts from one moment to the next and from one solo to the next: playful, tender, sometimes intense. Through the support, the inner sensations of the dancer become visible, with a certain transparency.

When the soloist is ready, they approach one of the helpers, who becomes the next soloist. And the circle can open: visitors, too, may find themselves lifted and carried by the four.

"Know thyself", says the inscription at the temple of Delphi. In Oracle, the body is the oracle: whoever comes to know their emotional body comes to know a great part of themselves.

At the centre stands a cluster of synthesisers, effect pedals and speakers, played live. Around it, a group of dancers circles slowly and continuously. Their movement comes from the fascia: they sense the continuous web inside them, follow how a movement travels through it, and listen to what surfaces on the way. Sensations, energies and feelings rise and become movement of their own.

Through this process, the dancers discover their own feelings and the relations between them. A movement passes from one body to another through resonance or touch; a tension in one dancer finds an answer in another. What begins as an inner listening becomes a shared one, until the group moves almost as one tissue, in a state of trance. The sharing and the transparency between the dancers carry the group towards joy and excitement – and sometimes, at the same time, one of them passes through a darker place. Both belong to the practice.

Now and then, a dancer steps up to the machines and turns a knob, or takes the microphone to speak a thought out loud. Oracle can be performed indoors or outdoors.

A handshake, stretched over several minutes. What begins as a familiar social gesture becomes a way of feeling into each other, and into the intention behind the gesture. Slowly the reference falls away and the movement turns abstract: through a single point of contact, the hand, the two dancers shift, negotiate and steer each other's whole body.

The handshake makes visible the power play between two bodies: seduction, submission, domination and agreement, constantly renegotiated between the two performers. The more sensitive the listening and the closer the intimacy, the more it shines. Performed almost like a French kiss, the simple gesture makes the two dancers vulnerable to each other, and opens a way for the audience to look into their souls.

In the version seen in the video, and at the opening of ODYSSÉES IMPRESSIONNISTES, the two dancers first listen to a 1960s interview with the writer Joyce Carol Oates, who is asked whether violence exists in human beings. She affirms that it does, when motivations are semi-conscious. Then they shake hands, and a throbbing music of rises and falls distorts the intentions of negotiation and agreement between them.

A spectator or passer-by is invited to a one-on-one conversation with a dancer, somewhere a little apart: in a corner of the room, or sitting under the stage. At the end of the conversation, the dancer offers them a dance related to what was exchanged.

Translucent polycarbonate panels, light enough to carry, large enough to make a room. They come from our piece Raumfelder – Champs d'espaces (2017), where building with them was one scene among others. Here the free construction becomes the whole work: the dancers keep building, leaning, balancing and taking apart new architectures – walls, roofs, gates, tables – always one gesture away from falling.

The idea behind it comes from the earlier piece: when we perceive space more clearly, our attention to time shifts towards the present. The panels sharpen that perception. Against their even, plastic surface, the outlines of skin and body stand out: the organic next to the made.

There are no rules for the audience. In Le Havre, the visitors' children simply came in, carried panels with the dancers and crawled under the roofs they had built, while most adults stayed at the edge and watched. The dancers take care of the structures to protect those close by; with more distance, a collapse may be allowed when the moment calls for it. The fragility stays.

House of Cards can last twenty minutes or several hours, with or without live sound.