Afterimage

MicroDanza by Philippe Kratz

Usually, dance is limited to representing ideas or states of mind through the form of the body. Through this MicroDanza, the choreographer Philippe Kratz has tried to increase the expressiveness of the story by immersing the dancer, as in the performance of the legendary Loïe Fuller, in an environment of colours, chosen according to Goethe’s theory of the chromatic circle (for example, yellow is linked to the image of the bon vivant and the lover, purple is attributed to the teacher and the philosopher, and so on).

Afterimage (i.e. “the residual image”, that is the permanence on the iris of the colours that we have looked at for a long time) takes its cue from a personal story of the performer that is developed on three levels that interact with each other: the form of the movement, the atmosphere of the sound experience and the colour represented by the video animated projections.

In this case, however, Afterimage is also translated as the permanence of a memory experienced before our eyes, which we do not necessarily relive chronologically, but which remains impressed on us as a sensation into which we enter completely.

The fluid lines of the dancer serenely blend or clash with the projections that make the physical place of the stage, rigid and limiting in its three white walls, malleable and ephemeral at the same time. And the individual imagination of the spectator is stimulated in the search for signs of a story that is not explicitly told, but manifests itself “impressionistically” among red suns and purple cubes.