Dorner, Axel

Super Axel Dorner

Label: Absinth Records Country: Germany

"The first piece on this disc is composed of parts of an improvisation that we recorded at Axel Dörner's house in Berlin. The second one is a live performance at Electronic Church, in Berlin. During this performance, as well as I playing music and reading texts aloud, I also danced. Although the movements can't be seen on a recording, we believe that the music is in itself, worth to listening to. Moreover, I think that the tension of not seeing goes along with Axel's timing - an invisible Axel Dörner, an invisible audience, an invisible universe made out of images. Yet here I am about to describe the dance.

Most of the movements that I made during this performance were repetitive patterns that added a visual stratum to the repetitions that were already present in our music. It's not even an extra stratum, but a way of reinforcing the presentation of the repetition as something in itself instead of focusing on the substance or matter that is supposedly repeated. Some of the repetitive movements that I was making were abstract, but I guess most of them were based on everyday movements taken out of context. I wouldn't make any distinction between the abstract and the recognizable movements. I believe that to proceed in this manner is a way of escaping from the old abstract/concrete dichotomy. It's also quite an effective way of harming our capability to recognize and, therefore, a way of forcing the question about the unknown and the new.

Apart from these movements, I also worked with poses that resemble the ones of a model or a mannequin. I would hold a pose for quite a long time, on one spot of the stage, maintaining a certain amount of tension, releasing only micro movements. Then, I would suddenly stop posing by walking normally to another spot on the stage and recreate the pose there as if it had never been interrupted. It would be like a broken pose that is distributed with a certain sense of timing at two or more points of space; or as if one were folding together two supposedly separated spatial points. The music we were playing with Axel implies this breakage or these folds as well, but in pure time events instead of time-spatial ones (although I must say that for moments during the performance Axel was also moving, walking and slowly spinning).

I'd also like to mention that the sound that you'll hear at 8´51´´ of this performance is me ripping off my T-shirt. From then on, I performed the rest of the piece bare-chested. It was a very tense moment both for me and for the audience (I don't know about Axel, because when he saw me bare-chested after we bowed, he looked at me and said, "What happened?"). Now, after the series of performances that I've been doing with Axel and other artists since 2007, it seems incredible to me that a simple action like ripping off one's T-shirt during a concert would have been so effective at that time - but indeed, it was. This concert with Axel is important for me because I was in a time of transition, when I was gradually giving up playing music and starting to work more with dance and spoken words (and later on with concepts, actions, etc.). I think that Axel was maybe the only person who has worked with me time after time, no matter what kind of material I suggest."-Diego Chamy