electronic performance
In “The Next Dimension”, the circus artist relives the fifteen seconds that almost cost him his life during a show in 2017.
It’s a story of falls, all ours, and especially that of Tsirihaka Harrivel, for the first time alone on the stage, after the magnificent Greatcreated with Vimala Pons, in 2016. A show about “inner exits”, and the exit doors, the impossibility of finding them without another – and here this other, “Vidor” has the appearance of a cartoon Vimala Pons –, and the sometimes painful ways of getting up. And it’s also a show without any particular circus virtuosity, and this surprising absence ends up being a source of emotion. What replaces the physical feat is the soundtrack of the show, an electronic sound performance that the circus performer plays on stage, transferring the sound of the fall, in a sound exploration, on a keyboard that provokes video images.
We lift our heads. A cartoon character falls from an endless skyscraper without ever reaching the ground. The picture stops. Where is the exit door? The performance reconnects with childhood, when alone in your room, you invent magic powers, which mutate into nightmares. There’s the angst that such powers work too well, and the horror of losing them, which always happens eventually.
Return at leisure to the fatal moment
The dimension according to is obviously a piece that we look at differently depending on whether we are an informed spectator, or whether we arrive in the room as if by chance, without knowing anything about the artistic alliance of Tsirihaka Harrivel and Vimala Pons, their way of play with their differences, their crazy and inventive acrobatics, and especially if we ignore this real fall which could have been fatal. Tsirihaka Harrivel clearly outlines the project in the theater program while he never refers to the fall on the set: «The dimension according to is a zoomed-in enlargement of a detail from the show’s twenty-eighth minute GREAT» he wrote, when a safety hook released and threw him into an eight-meter gap. The Circassian miraculously escaped with a broken rib. The good thing about not dying is that you can come back at your leisure to the fatal moment, dissect the gestures, remember that you are alive, go back to that moment, the stretch. Six years later, how did he come back?
It’s almost a child’s voice that opens the performance: “I wanted to speak before we start to outline what you are going to see. It is the story of a person marked by the image of a fall. The fall lasted half a second. Fall that he breaks down into ten states including “something unexpected, gesture of control, I’m dreaming, I have to forget everything”. The show will explore his states. “Changing skin, looking for a way out, no longer knowing, having exhausted one’s possibilities” are some of the mantras that Harrivel repeats, in one of his solitary explorations before getting up again. Courage crushes the heart. And like the images that we scratch off and which open onto others, the dimension according to is also a love story. The most moving moment of the performance is when a semi-life-size Vimala Pons puppet carries Tsirihaka on his shoulders while dancing, and following the injunctions to the letter.