In ‘Second Life’ the camera is alternately ally and enemy

Always interesting, always risky. Naming someone else’s famous work of art as the starting point for a new creation inevitably leads to a comparison. Choreographer Jasper van Luijk took the risk and refers with SecondLife to the ‘video ballet’ Live, a masterpiece from the oeuvre of Hans van Manen who already in 1979 gave an almost definitive demonstration of the possible use of live video projection in a performance. Finally, with that unforgettable image of Coleen Davis leaving Theater Carré and walking away along the Amstel.

Van Luijk starts with projections of a man and a woman’s quest at various film-genic outdoor locations: a beautiful wooded bank, steel constructions, an old cemetery. Searching, for themselves, each other. The transition to the performance on the floor is hard. In the first part, the cameraman stays in the background; the dancers (Carolina Mancuso in a loose, ocher yellow costume, Jeroen Janssen in blue) find each other naturally, as a couple who are familiar with each other. Their bodies make beautifully drawn lines, interrupted by abrupt impulses and turns.

Competition

When the cameraman (Sjoerd Derine) emphatically reports to the floor, their relationship and their focus change. The self-evidence is disturbed, competition for the attention of the third party arises. Each plays a game in front of the camera and creates a desired digital image of themselves, which is repeated on a mounted version on a projection screen. Close-up images reveal that behind the deliberately constructed image are darker emotions, fear and sadness.

Sometimes the dancers seek privacy behind the projection screen, where the camera still manages to find them. This creates an interaction between dancers and camera. Over and over again they use and attack each other, the balance of power shifts again and again.

Compared to the crystal-clear dramaturgical coherence of Van Manen’s masterpiece, SecondLife however, stick somewhere halfway in one’s own intentions. The function of the repetitions is weakly worked out, the exterior shots do not follow logically from the action on the floor and the Spanish text (about the end of a relationship) is essentially superfluous. The power play between dancers and cameraman comes across well and shows how the camera can alternately be an ally and an enemy in the digital age. In that respect, the final scene is well chosen, with Janssen left alone on stage, searching for the eye of the other – he does not exist without it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HO46WO4ht3k