Last Dance | And for the time being by Ian Kaler and Stéphane Peeps Moun (19–21 July 2024, Uferstudio 14) joins two solos that sculpt time through physical movement—text and dance interact as staged material, producing subtle relationships between human and non-human subjects.
Two solos, titles graphically separated and combined by a pipe symbol, shared the same scenography: a large, dark, square, slanted, board, a bed of sand scattered with rocks, and a big screen on the back wall. Dressed in thick trousers and a tight sportswear top, Ian Kaler, opening the show with And for the time being, composed a physical vocabulary of smooth movement that locked and popped through his body, gradually taking him high and low across the floor and the sloped board, through the sand and over the rocks. This slick, thick, arrhythmic movement language was subtitled by a poetic narrative about an encounter between a man and a horse, projected on the screen upstage. An excerpt of this ongoing prose:
He rides through the forest at a comfortable, even pace. One he is free to set and keen not to waste. Nervous at first, but assured now by the unseen presence around him, unseen, but surely felt.
Kaler’s dancing during most of his solo was stage left, and the exquisite text appeared upstage right. I couldn’t perceive the two materials simultaneously, one or the other an “unseen presence”. I consciously watched his detailed, clean, crafted dancing (without “waste”, giving efficient, cool affect) at the expense of reading. After some minutes, I turned my gaze to the written poetry. These experiences hypnotically informed each other; I beheld a body “growing endlessly like a tree” after I read something along these lines and automatically transferred the image of Kaler’s graceful, sensorial dancing figure into the ongoing written narration.
©Dieter Hartwig
The soundscape of synthesisers and drum samples relentlessly beat the space with doofs. This was a homogenisation for me: the performance blended in my mind with a few too many contemporary dance works from the last decade in Berlin that take on the club aesthetic, flattening the specificity and captivating presence of Kaler’s skilled embodiments.
First named and last performed, Last Dance by Kaler’s longtime friend and collaborator Stéphane Peeps Moun came next, suggesting an intentional troubling of beginnings and endings. Also accompanied by words on the screen—a conversation between the artist and his mother in Lemandais and French—Peeps layered text with his dancing differently. Often, Peeps performed high-energy spurts of hip-hop-esque dancing and then reduced the tempo of his movement production to a slower, subtle pace, during which written dialogue would appear and sound with him still in my line of sight so I could take them in together, complementing one another. Kaler and Peeps shared a soundscape that transformed and enriched during Last Dance, giving way to piano keys and jazz rhythms and expanding into more vivid imaginaries. After applause for both solos, special guest drummer Anatole Serret played a drum set with Kaler and Peeps jamming. They danced and smiled at each other and the audience, free from the precision of their choreographic scores, releasing into the unbridled liberation of social dance. Peeps’ title reflects his decision that this will be his last performance onstage, dedicated to his mother Martine, whose voice I’ve just absorbed, and who, in Last Dance, will see her son perform onstage for the first time. One’s last is another’s first, and performing on stage ends with a return to dancing with and for each other elsewhere and otherwise, perhaps “unseen, but surely felt”.
Last Dance | And for the time being by Ian Kaler and Stéphane Peeps Moun was performed on 19–21 July 2024 at Uferstudios.
