Gisela Rocha: “Disclose”

“She’d have been 126 years old today,” I thought, as my train passed fields and cities enshrouded by the winter dusk; an all consuming darkness, evoking perhaps the same kind of black despair that ultimately convinced Virginia Woolf to drown herself in the river Ouse in 1941. Mere speculation.

The fragment of an essay Woolf wrote sprang to mind as I travelled towards Arnhem to see the performance “Blaze of Glory” by Introdans:
“Life is not a series of lamps symmetric-ally arranged … but a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end … a myriad of impressions … falling from all sides in an incessant shower of innumerable atoms.” (Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction,” The Times Literary Supplement 1919)

Introdans’ triptych of choreographies I felt, all dealt in part with the idea of awareness and our cognitive facilities. From the absolutely sublime and impassioned miniature “Most of the Day I’m Out” by Yossi Berg and Oded Graf, to Mats Ek’s finely constructed and subtly visually enacted psycho drama of love, death and the divine entitled “Fireplace.” However after the intermission that shower of “innumerable atoms,” the ...