A Dance with Alice and Raimundas

Tristis cerno arbor. Demulceo aut cibus. Tolero comis aetas. Surculus talis avaritia. Qui sto coaegresco. Cetera anser socius.

The dance of companionship is a practice Alice has been developing, dancing, and guiding people through since 2014. It is a guided dance framed by a text, and it also involves writing poems. The text weaves together propositions for dance and narrative fragments about forms of togetherness. It is a practice of being-with: with dance, with oneself, with each other, in attentive and intimate distance. As we focus with ever more detail on the present events, dance – our companion – continuously moves away as that which exceeds the dancer’s own doings. It is a horizon and a companion; a partner that remains unknown, whose unknowability obliges and displaces. Raimundas and Alice met in Vienna in 2014, about the time when Alice began working on the Dance of Companionship. Last December they danced it together. Now Raimundas opens up the dance’s imaginary by entering the writing of its framing inscription. ‘It is like entering the microphone or a music track’, he says, ‘both at the same time, on a tracing paper size of a conversation’.

Alice Chauchat has been dancing, choreographing, teaching, supporting peers, making up structures for collective thinking and making, writing, and generally pondering through choreographic practice on ethics and aesthetics of alterity and togetherness. She currently teaches at HZT Berlin.

Raimundas Malašauskas has co-written an opera libretto, co-produced a television show, served as an agent for dOCUMENTA (13), curated for the Lithuanian and Cyprus pavilions at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013, teaches at HEAD – Geneva School of Art and Design, and keeps occurring under hypnosis.