about
// Charlotte Vanden Eynde worked within kwaad bloed from 2000 to 2005.
// For more info on her current work please visit www.charlottevandeneynde.be
With Beginnings/Endings Charlotte Vanden Eynde enters new territory, in several ways.
For the first time, she does not appear on stage herself. It is also the first time that she creates a work for a group of six performers and for a big stage. Moreover, with this creation she wants to return to pure movement, in contrast to earlier works, which were based on a certain theme or formal aspects like costumes, objects or video.
After an intensive dance training, she initially felt that in her own work she needed to distance herself from this training as much as possible. In Map Me, her last creation, she reached the limit of visual stilling. The body became an image, a canvas, a projection screen. For some time, it was the end point.
With Beginnings/Endings she wants to go back to where it all began, to pure movement, the pure body. Together with the dancers, she searches for a motive to create the movement.
At the beginning of the rehearsal process, the dancers improvise eyes shut to enhance their corporal conscience, to establish a feeling, not a thinking relationship with their bodies. This way, movement comes into being from a physical situation, from the body itself, and not from contemplative thinking. The dancers try to avoid acquired dance movements, in order to make the movements as authentic as possible, i.e., proper to each dancer's body. That way, Charlotte Vanden Eynde searches for an 'unmoulded' and 'primitive' movement language. The motorial development of her little daughter is in that sense an important source of inspiration.
In that same way, the group works on movement starting from the contact with other bodies. Here, the work is mainly focused on tactile conscience. At the same time, other previously prepared movements and body images are tried out, but the motive, which only starts taking shape as they go along, is always the same: what is 'the beginning' of movement and what can movement teach us about 'the beginning' of mankind and humanity?
In Beginnings/Ending, like in all her work, Charlotte Vanden Eynde tries again to bring something essentially human to the surface.
The movement material is brought together in an organic structure, unlike her last presentations, where the structure was fragmentary.
In spite of its physical point of departure, for Charlotte Vanden Eynde, Beginnings/Endings is a deeply emotionally charged work: "We do not only have blood running through our veins, but also emotion. If you let your body go its own way, it will always tell you something. It does not need any 'input' to do so."
