Eulogy to the Shade

In the summer of 2008, Malgven Gerbes and David Brandstätter travelled for two months through South Korea and Japan, together with the video artist Julien Crépieux and the sound designer Christoph Engelke. Every day, in a new environment, we created a site-specific performance with local artists.

We stayed in Seoul for some time before travelling on through South Korea and then to Japan. Many contacts came from the six months we had spent teaching in Seoul the year before; in Japan, they came by word of mouth, from artists who knew artists we had worked with. Often we were hosted by local artists, or stayed close by, met them over dinner and performed together the next day – mostly with dancers, but also with visual artists and musicians. One moment stands out: a performance on a rooftop among the metal workshops south of the river in Seoul, near Mullae-dong.

The title comes from Jun'ichirō Tanizaki's essay In Praise of Shadows. For us, the shade was the place lost in translation between cultures: the ambiguity in which movements vibrate through different bodies. Over time it became clearer, while a respectful distance was kept.

Eulogy to the Shade is the film that documents this journey. It was shown at several small film festivals and often alongside performances of NOTEBOOK, the stage piece that grew out of the travel, whose video projections and sound recordings come from the same material.

The journey was an important step in our relationship with Asia. It gave us time to take in what our collaborators there had given us – a warm welcome and the promise of future work. Their different social structures and ways of working, and the enthusiasm we met, in Korea above all, were inspiring. Asia felt on the rise; Europe, in comparison, a little sleepy.