One night in 2023, the dancer DD Dorvillier had a dream. It happened during a journey she was taking across France, whose pastoral landscapes left an indelible impression on her. Upon waking up, she jotted down the dance movements that she had seen in her sleep and felt that she’d already encountered them somewhere before.
That experience materialized last week before a theater audience at the Chocolate Factory in Queens, where Dorvillier performed “Dance is the archeologist, or an idol in the bone” as part of L’Alliance’s Crossing the Line Festival. Standing against a whitewashed wall in a black T-shirt and jeans, she began by stretching out her right arm, clenching her fist and twisting it around. Suddenly, as if surprised by the sensation in her hand, she exclaimed, “What if?”
The open-ended question lingered throughout the next hour as Dorvillier shifted between stillness and barely controlled, sprawling movements. What if I tried this? What if this has happened before? She carefully examined the wave of her hand, the muscles in her left thigh. Looking back at the audience with one eye sealed shut, she was offering an invitation to an unpredictable adventure across memory. In the empty space between the dancer and the audience, one could find a reflection of their own past, or maybe a glimpse into the future. “What if?” became a question for spectators to direct inward.
Moving along the meandering course of a sleepwalker, Dorvillier performed some familiar routines: she stretched out an invisible drape between her hands and lovingly observed it before hanging it out to dry, squatted and pretended to dig into the ground, imitated swimming strokes and martial arts stances. Sound emerged – a noise so inconspicuous it could have been coming from the street, a tingling electronic pulse that resembled the chirping of crickets.
The performance, Dorvillier’s first in New York in eight years, offered her the chance to share the discoveries she made at La Corvette, a multidisciplinary research and creation space in Côte d’Or, Burgundy that she inaugurated in 2020 with frequent sound collaborator Sébastien Roux. Its purpose, according to her website, is to “cultivate a sustainable artistic practice” that involves writing, filming, drawing, and dancing outdoors.
Roux’s soundtrack for “Dance is the archeologist” preserved the trance-like feel of the performance, with unassuming reverberations cascading through the room. Once in a while Dorvillier broke the somber sounds with a scream, groan, or wheeze, as if one of the movements surprised her or hurt. The unexpected contrast between her voice and motion created a haunting distortion, as the bursts of pain and frustration in her voice threatened to disrupt the illusion.
Throughout the performance, Dorvillier faced an invisible dance partner whom she motioned toward, clasping her fingers as if beckoning them to follow her. Impatient, she lifted her gaze in the direction of the viewers, suggesting that anyone in the audience could become her partner, simply by using their imagination. Her gaze always fixed on something that seemed to be situated far beyond the confines of the theater; she marveled at the sensations in her body or at the faraway landscapes imprinted in her mind.
Some of Dorvillier’s movements were so frantic that one could assume she was improvising, still pulling ideas out of a dream. However, about halfway through the piece, she returned to the upstage-left corner of the space and began the performance all over again. The trajectory of her path resembled what she had danced before but was not identical. The memory of the past was already deformed, questioned, and nothing could go back to the way it had been half an hour earlier.
Dorvillier journeyed through inaccessible depths of memory, digging through visions of the past in a search for meaning. While presenting two iterations of the same dance, she performed gestures that, the second time around, appeared at once familiar and foreign. The variations provoked my curiosity about how repetition affects ideas and images that lodge in the mind. As the lights began to dim and the music subsided, I was thrust back into reality with the impression that something had irrevocably changed.
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