European premiere of Guy de Cointet’s Five Sisters in Amsterdam and international tour
Thursday 3 and Friday 4 November 2011
STUK kunstencentrum
Naamsestraat 96, Leuven
Bookings: www.stuk.be
Saturday 12 November 2011
Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León
Avenida Reyes Leoneses 24, León
Bookings: www.musac.es
“Are they four, five sisters? Or more? The five sisters themselves may not know for sure…”
On Friday 28 and Saturday 29 October 2011 at 20:30 hrs, If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution is restaging the play Five Sisters (1982) by Guy de Cointet at Frascati WG in Amsterdam. The premiere will be followed by a tour that travels to STUK kunstencentrum in Leuven on 3 and 4 November, and MUSAC in León on 12 November, before embarking on an American, French and British tour in 2012.Five Sisters is a play that oozes with the West Coast culture of health and beauty. It presents the story of five sisters, who busy themselves with the problems and pleasures of modern life on a Sunday afternoon. The California sun provokes their reactions, emotions and moods. De Cointet explored the affective wellbeing of women who have changing, restless, encounters in their parental home, discussing issues of wardrobe, suntan, health, exotic holidays, work and painting. Marie de Brugerolle describes the sisters in her recent publication on Guy de Cointet: “One character could no longer bear the sun, whereas another was overexcited and in desperate need of a vacation; yet another character constantly changed her clothes and, whatever happened, brought everything down to a question of clothing” (JRP|Ringier, 2011). Through a combination of minimalist and baroque elements, de Cointet plays with the construction of individuality, the expression of emotion and the perversion of language. Five Sisters is the last performance that was staged during the artist’s lifetime and marks a departure from his earlier work in its attention to light as the main catalyst of emotion. De Cointet collaborated with the sculptor Eric Orr (1939–1998) who created the stage, the lighting and the sound. In the new production, the light and sound plan is reconstructed by Elizabeth Orr. The performers are dressed by moniquevanheist.
Guy de Cointet (1934–1983) is typically an ‘artist of the artists’; an enigmatic figure who lived in Los Angeles most of his life, where he developed a polymorphic corpus of works. Posing as an art critic, he once described himself in the following manner: “If you crossed James Joyce with Marcel Duchamp, added Harold Pinter, Roland Barthes and a dash of Sesame Street, you’d get a lumpy prototype of Guy de Cointet. He’s a mild-mannered Frenchman who braves the outmost wilderness of language, fashioning plays, operas, books and drawings that make alphabet soup of our cherished linguist packaging. Orthodox thinkers beware.”
Performance in Residence
This restaging of Five Sisters is the result of a research conducted by art historian Marie de Brugerolle, as part of If I Can’t Dance’s programme Performance in Residence. With this programme, If I Can’t Dance looks at past performances that we consider important from the point of view of contemporary performance practice. A performance functions as a case study for a comprehensive research project by an invited curator, leading to the development of a new production. The current rendition of Five Sisters addresses questions around the idea of ‘making Five Sisters anew’ and its place in a contemporary context, and thus deviates from earlier restagings of de Cointet’s plays that focused on reconstruction. A publication on the case study, conceptualized by If I Can’t Dance, Marie de Brugerolle and Will Holder, will be published in 2012.
Five Sisters
Concept play and text: Guy de Cointet
Light and Stage Design: Eric Orr
Direction: Jane Zingale
Dramaturgy: Marie de Brugerolle
Performance: Violeta Sanchez, Einat Tuchman, Adva Zakai, Veridiana Zurita
Light & sound: Elizabeth Orr
Wardrobe: moniquevanheist
Publication: Will Holder
Director’s assistant: Vivan Ziherl
Curator: Frédérique Bergholtz
Language: English spoken
Film screening
If I Can’t Dance in collaboration with SMART Project Space, present a screening of Who’s That Guy? Tell me more about Guy de Cointet. A Portrait of an Artist by Artists (directed by Marie de Brugerolle, produced by Entre2prises, 2011, 90 minutes, English spoken) on Thursday 27 October at 20:00 hrs at SMART Project Space. This film portrait of the artist is composed of interviews and documents compiled by art critic Marie de Brugerolle over a period of 10 years. Artists including John Baldessari, Christophe Bourseiller, Larry Bell and Paul McCarthy talk about their contemporary de Cointet and unreleased documents provide insight into the singularity of his oeuvre.
Partners:
Five Sisters is initiated and co-produced by If I Can’t Dance in Amsterdam, STUK Kunstencentrum in Leuven and MUSAC in León, and is financially supported by the Guy de Cointet Estate, Étant Donnés, the Mondriaan Foundation, the Culture Programme of the European Union, and the Amsterdam Fund for the Arts. With thanks to Yael Davids, Dora García, the Eric Orr Estate, Frascati Theatre and SMART Project Space.
If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution
If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution is an association that is dedicated to exploring the evolution and typology of performance and performativity in contemporary art. From its headquarters in Amsterdam, If I Can’t Dance develops art works and thematic programmes with artists, curators and researchers on the basis of long term collaborations, and presents these projects at (inter)national venues. Website: www.ificantdance.org
