Breeding Brains and Beauty

Breeding, Brains and Beauty

By COCOs: Bojana Cvejic, Jefta van Dinther, Sandra Iché, Mette Ingvartsen and Jan Ritsema

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The ultimate meaning of a performance is determined above all by the way you work on it. (COCOs)

The meaning of a word is the way it is used. (Ludwig Wittgenstein)

Breeding, Brains & Beauty is constructed as a choreography in which the parameters (light, costumes, editing, sound) of a Hollywood melodrama from the 1940s are separated from each other. In each scene these parameters are brought back together in different constellations. In the performance the traditional link between sound and image is disconnected. What the spectators can see live on stage and what they can hear through their headphones is not synchronised. Choreography in this context can be seen as a way of organizing the tension, the ‘movement’ that is generated by this new juxtaposition. But the film is at the same time a virtual source for imagining other possible audio-visual creations: besides choreography, also radio-graphy, a blind cinema. The experience of the spectator depends on him actively composing the formal, narrative, idiosyncratic or generic relations and encounters of the bodies on stage.

Breeding, Brains & Beauty is a performance that was influenced directly by the working conditions predetermined by the makers: stolen and unpaid time and space in which they could think, produce and dance, sometimes together and sometimes at a distance. Within this framework they searched for sense whilst avoiding imposing an absolute, unifying principle on each other. In many ways, none of the makers would have chosen to create this performance on their own.

The COCOs ‘group’ consists of five theatre-makers and performers: Bojana Cvejic, Jefta van Dinther, Sandra Iché, Mette Ingvartsen and Jan Ritsema. Some of them had already worked together in various combinations: Ritsema, Cvejic and Ingvartsen had for example created Pipelines, a Construction and knowH2Ow, van Dinther had danced in Ingvartsen’s performances to come and Why We Love Action, and Iché had worked on her solo project together with Ritsema and Cvejic. We could call this a ‘network’ rather than a group: linked by all sorts of artistic and intellectual threads, in constant conversation with each other, while each of them also goes their own way and engages in projects with other performers.

Breeding, Brains and Beauty was created in the span of slightly more than a year. The first working session took place in May 2007 at the PAF (Performing Arts Forum), a research centre for the visual and performing arts, new media and internet, set up by Jan Ritsema near Reims in France. In the months that followed, the ‘co-creators’ only saw each other occasionally, but in February and March 2008 there was a crucial rehearsal period in the Kaaistudios and Nadine, which was rounded off with a presentation of what they had made. The second presentation was in Montpellier in July, after a week of working together.

COCOs are Bojana Cvejic, Jefta van Dinther, Sandra Iché, Mette Ingvartsen and Jan Ritsema

Breeding, Brains & Beauty is an unsubsidized project. We thank: Nadine, PAF St. Erme, Kaaitheater, Centre Chorégraphique de Montpellier, Languedoc-Roussillion, ROSAS, Mug met de gouden tand, STUK Leuven, deepblue, Anne-Catherine Kunz, Denise Le Cocq, Perrine Bailleux, Gerald Kurdian, Peter Lenaerts, Carolien Hermans.