In The System of the World, demented Jesuit fanatic Édouard de Gex is meditating on Satanists, and to paraphrase says there are two kinds, one far worse than the other. The Satanist who believes in and genuinely worships the Devil, while depraved is nonetheless of a different order of heathen to the Satanist who affects and performs belief out of an atheistic desire to annoy Christians. The former no matter how deep they have sunk is redeemable because they still believe that God exists; the latter is forever damned and is the most reprehensible beast of all humanity, because at their heart, they believe in nothing. Of course I’m one of the latter.
I’ve been watching the video of the first two rehearsals, and editing out short cuts that will very soon form the core of the eventual performance and film. It’s sort of a continuation of a method of making complex movement that I left off with carnivore, but instead on using computer-generated animation to make the base movement and then operating on it with a variety of spatial and temporal tools, this is being made initially with the tools, and then we video the improvisation (which is often a dirty word). I’d been wanting to work this way for a while, as a means of not making the kind of movement I know I would normally make, but as to how it will work, I’m not sure.
The reference to Satanism in such a piece of apparently ‘pure’ dance is a result of Leibniz who in no small way was concerned with God, and his Théodicée, where the dream of Sextus Tarquin is a model for an infinity of possible worlds, which comes back to Monads and the black box of the Temperance Hall.
