From her nest within the skin of the Charter House of Mont-Saint-Michel, Princess Dahut restages the mythical flooding of her city in dance - a winding tale of upended exploitation played out across seas, a travelling performance that mutates and reforms in frozen motion from stage to stage.
In the Palm Court of Edinburgh’s North British Hotel, we meet our architectural dancers performing displacement; ten skins assembled into a folded stage. Infiltrating the husk of the General Post Office, these ten dancers play out the ghost of Kinloch Castle, fusing in motion as four inhabited canopies suspended above a cascading ground carved into geological fog. In Mont-Saint-Michel, these four canopies themselves become dancers, negotiating the alien grain of the Abbey into which they are transposed. In accommodating their movements, the Merveille itself is at once disfigured and completed, surgical incisions and violent carvings made into the granite fabric to accommodate an unwieldy play of suspension and counterweighting.
In each performance, the dance carves and claims a strange new landscape as traced by the recording of its motion, becoming a colossal archive for the housing of displaced information – forgotten histories, exploited resources, dispossessed land – inhabited by spaces for the perusal, oration and performance of that which is archived within. Where the flooding of Ys was brought on by her stealing of a book, the flood-as-dance over which Princess Dahut presides facilitates an ironic, inversed theft, a counter-exploitation, in the reclamation and staging of the lost and dispossessed.
