LOUISE DAHL LINDVALL
Deserting Las Vegas at Auto Service de la Jonction in Geneva. Photo: Christian Lutz.
Deserting Las Vegas at Greensboro University of North Carolina, with Louise Dahl Lindvall and Yannis Francois. Photo Daphné Bengoa.
Eternal Tour 2011: Deserting Las Vegas
"The contemporary as a cacaphonic mess gives us enormous hope"
An experimental stage show for six performers travelling from Geneva to New York, and from New York to Las Vegas.
With and by: Adaline Anobile, Daphné Bengoa, Donatella Bernardi, Gilda Bouchat, Louise Dahl Lindvall, Rudy Decelière, Noémie Étienne, Yannis Francois, Anne-Laure Kénol, Marc Ruchmann, Denis Schuler.
"The opening of Deserting Las Vegas takes place in the middle of the desert.
This desert presents several semantic dimensions. It’s a geographical place: the Mojave Desert, named after the Indian tribe who once lived in the land located in the actual States of California, Nevada and Arizona. But the desert is also, symbolically, the place from which nowadays, we are to think the contemporary world. The disappearance of the question of being, in the most nihilistic period of western metaphysics, is the horizon in which the desert advances.
Six figures, four of which embody both an existential and philosophical point of view, try to develop several strategies to escape in one way or another the desert, deserting the absurd gulf between sense and nonsense, being and nothingness, in which they are stuck. Boredom becomes the affective atmosphere permitting and opening a space to ask questions. Leisure can no longer to turn us away from this task: how to think after devastation? Away with utopia and multiculturalism!
The extensive states of conscience, advocated by the apostles of the psychedelic sixties, has become hygienic: a trip on Las Vegas’ Strip, but within the limits of licit, the ultimate thrill without abusing substances, neon powder as unique vector of ecstasy. In this disenchanted context, an artistic expression seems to be the ultimate possible place for an eventual exceeding of nihilism. Gender, class, minorities, domination, destruction, Blacks, Jews, Mexicans, Arabs: everybody is the « indian », the outcast, of someone … How can we nevertheless be together in contemporaneity? This is the leitmotif of the performance."
(Press release for Deserting Las Vegas at Teatro Paraguas in Santa Fe)