Rating

Loss-Layers is an audio-visual performance of contemporary dance, a fight that questions situations of loss (balance, bearings, control, identity) in a hostile world. This combat is played out in a subjective time span, contracting, constantly accelerating, in overdrive due to pressure. The surrounding atmosphere is intense. There is nothing to hold on to in a moving world.

Three elements are simultaneously developed: sound, image and body. The images seep into the body. The audience can no longer decipher what is real from what is not.  The spectator is lost between illusion and reality. Doubt and fright gradually set in, inducing the spectator to notice tiny significant details and enter into a feeling of resistance or acceptance in front of overflow.

Loss-Layers  is a series of situations, actions and images about the fear of the loss of identity – about who you are and who you must become to be able to live in an antagonistic world.

View their Trailer

“A.lter S.essio leads us into a mad world of noise and fury, injecting us at once with a sense of warmth and empathy. Besides the perfect dance choreography and the ingenious use of new technologies, the great human themes are criss-crossed within a style in a class of its own. An experience of great elegance, not to be missed.”

- Laetitia Chauvin, Communications Officer, Ministry of Culture

“Mixing together numerical art and contemporary dance in a noisy musical context and articulating them to represent forms of oppression is a chorographical feat in itself. With the precision of a watch-maker, Fabrice Planquette manages to stage our senses within a performance where technology is not just a means to an end but part and parcel of the whole emotional scene. In an intense universe where the radical concepts of «disquietedness» and «hope» remind us, in their own way, that the unacceptable is forever lurking on the sidelines of the acceptable.”

- Loïc Lecomte, Director of La Luciole

A.lter S.essio is a France-based artist collective with members Fabrice Planquette and Yum Keiko Takayama creating dance-performances mixing contemporary and neo-butoh dance and audio-visual/digital development, as well as video series and installations.

Loss is a recurring starting point in A.lter S.essio’s performances, such as the loss of balance, bearings, control, identity, link in ENDurance, and loss of the sacred in EXTension(s). We don't treat it as a negative value, but as a possibility to open a new space. The performance LOSS-LAYERS gives us an insight into a dark and powerful universe in which we feel the invisible pull of acceleration, profusion and negation of the human being. But this experience offers the possibility of a new relation to the world. Loss becomes the necessary state to modify our view. It's not end, it's an opening. Anyway, what matters most is to avoid running one’s own loss, which occurs when someone gives himself body and soul to a human project mounted by the intellect or instigated by the personality, which prevents one from remembering what one came to do here.

Because there is the labyrinth for making the test, and the test is real only for those who really lost, and whoever loses is no longer there to carry testimony of her loss - and say: "Enter through the maze is easy. Nothing more difficult than to get out. No one is confused that it will be lost first. "

- Maurice Blanchot, in La part du feu.

"It's not often that the loss of things that teaches the value."

- Arthur Schopenhauer