Comme il est bon de passer entre les  gouttes… Ode à la pluie, au gris et à tous les élans naissants lorsque  la pluie s’abat sur nos fronts. Le nouveau seule-en-scène d’Iona  D’Annunzio ouvre les parapluies et les esprits. La pièce, montrée en  novembre au Point Favre, revient les 22 et 23 janvier à l’Étincelle –  Maison de Quartier de la Jonction.

Le spectacle des Petits Parapluies célèbre cette minute d’admiration, lorsque, accoudé·e sur le rebord de  la fenêtre, vous regardez la danse des gouttes d’eau, glissant  harmonieusement sur les brins d’herbe – il pleut dru mais la légèreté de  l’eau l’emporte sur la catastrophe des plans à revoir pour la journée.  Des parapluies essaimés sur le plateau, comme des touches de couleur sur  une palette nue, s’animent dans les mains de la danseuse au gré de la  bande-son, réalisée par Nicolas Senjaric. Une musique agitée,  évocatrice, étonnante et quelquefois douloureuse. La musique, comme les  parapluies, ne suit pas les mouvements de la danseuse, elles existent  toutes deux dans des mondes différents et se rencontrent soudainement.  Ceci donne l’impression de ne pas suivre une chorégraphie calibrée mais  bien de découvrir différents pans d’une histoire, page après page. La  danseuse est forte de propositions, passant de l’univers du ballet  classique à celui de l’imitation d’animaux.

Iona D’Annunzio dit avoir conçu le  spectacle pour le public des très petits (dès 2 ans) et on les remercie,  puisque c’est grâce à eux et avec eux que nous remontons le fil des  tableaux colorés proposés par la danseuse sur scène. On saluera la valse  des projecteurs qui, en balayant la scène de couleurs bien différentes,  donne à ce court spectacle une profondeur étonnante : ces changements  donnent l’impression de vivre simultanément des histoires pourtant bien  distinctes, comme lorsque l’on passe de la crème chantilly au chocolat  chaud puis au fond plus pâteux mais délicieux déposé dans la tasse. Des  détails précieux !

La dimension colorée, dans une pièce qui  s’ouvre sur les bruits de la pluie, rappelle nos efforts, lorsqu’il  faut, en plein mois de novembre tout gris, tout fripé, redoubler  d’imagination pour divertir les jeunes âmes. C’est amusant de voir tous  les rôles investis par les parapluies aux manettes d’Iona D’Annunzio.  Ici, l’on célèbre la force d’imagination et de poésie qui créent, tour à  tour, un aquarium, une forêt enchanteresse, comme si l’on repoussait  les frontières du possible. Si, si, une méduse peut être taureau ou  cracher, tout à coup, des paillettes ou devenir cabane au cœur vibrant.  Il suffit de voir pour y croire, à tel point que, lorsque l’on ressort  dans le brouillard, la tête vibrante d’émotions, on a bien envie de se  lancer dans un 1,2,3, Soleil.

Al  Palazzo Scammacca, nell’ambito del Catania Fringe Off, è andato in  scena lo spettacolo della Compagnia svizzera Woman’s Move di e con Elsa  Couvreur

Nello storico Palazzo Scammacca, e precisamente al Monk, la sala di uno dei più famosi jazz club della città, è andato in scena The sensemaker della Compagnia svizzera Woman’s Move di e con Elsa Couvreur, nell’ambito del Catania Fringe Off«Buongiorno a tutti i nostri collaboratori sono momentaneamente occupati». Apparentemente hostess,  il velato imbarazzo e la disposizione di “voler far di tutto pur di”  sono gli abiti della personaggia davanti a noi: una delle tante candidate per un presunto lavoro.Il contesto è quasi surreale, ci troviamo in una piccola sala d’attesa vuota dove il colloquio della donna avviene con una voce registrata. Invitata a posizionarsi al centro  della stanza, esattamente davanti ai nostri sguardi, ascoltiamo  un’estenuante sequenza di comunicazioni da centralino (quelle tipiche da  “servizio clienti”), tutte ripetute in diverse lingue.

Noia, impazienza e sopportazione si traducono ripetutamente in squilli distorti del telefono,  sequenze musicali composte da patchwork di diverse tracce e generi (dal  sacro al metal), espressività e micromovimenti di impazienza che sono  la danza quotidiana di tutte e tutti noi. Non solo, la performer inizia a  seguire il parlato registrato con gesti che ricordano il linguaggio Lis,  traducendo quindi ritmicamente quel sonoro, scollandosi quasi da sé  stessa e dal senso della sua presenza in quel luogo: un bug umano  irrazionale?
I momenti di attesa sono fittamente scanditi da enunciati come: «La vostra richiesta è in fase di elaborazione» o «La preghiamo di attendere, grazie»; leitmotiv austeri, ridondanti e tragicomici che hanno sollecitato in più momenti  le risa del pubblico. Dopo diversi tentativi la registrazione prosegue.Per poter concludere la procedura, che non sappiamo quale sia, ma è davvero ininfluente, la voce registrata pone domande assurde come: «Lei come persona può trasmettere la morte?», «Ha mai lavorato nell’ambito del porno?», «Pensa di essere in gravidanza?», «Ha competenze in ambito terroristico?». Dopo aver risposto al sinistro interrogatorio – SI equivaleva a un battito delle mani, NO a due – Couvreur è obbligata, pena la cancellazione della sua richiesta, a sostenere prove fisiche bizzarre.

Senza  mai proferire parola, si sviluppa davanti a noi una coreografia che,  insieme alla sua espressività sempre “serena”, dipinge un’atmosfera grottesca,  richiamando, inoltre, l’idea di un provino teatrale. Le viene  comunicato, infatti, che sono arrivate numerose candidature e le viene  augurata una futura collaborazione.Quello che sembra essere un  finale poco felice in realtà non lo è. La conclusione, infatti, rimane  aperta perché, dopo quell’ultimatum veniamo a conoscenza del fatto che  la sua richiesta è stata portata a termine, lasciando l’esito, appunto,  in sospeso.The sensemaker è uno spettacolo tragicomico,  un solo che mette in luce con chiarezza virtuosismo e fallimento del  nostro convivere con forme di intelligenza artificiale disparate. La  solidità del concept è arricchita dall’attraversamento di questioni di  genere e certi meccanismi di ricerca lavorativa nel mondo teatrale che  sono molto spesso una sofferenza poco sostenibile.

REVIEW: The Sensemaker, Woman’s Move ★★★★★

Words by Jake Mace

Delightfully frustrating, The Sensemaker sees  Elsa Couvreur’s character navigate the arbitrary bureaucracy of a  robotic answering machine. All the while, Couvreur interrupts, disrupts  and grooves as classic soundbites from films intersect with voice notes  recorded in a dozen different languages. It’s a whirlwind concept –  proving that if you grab an idea like this and let your imagination run  away with it, you can find a potently effective blend of slapstick  comedy and dystopian, Kafkaesque terror.

Couvreur mimes word-perfect to a cascading series of pop culture  motifs played over the speakers, twisting around commands barked to her  by an disembodied formal voice. The ambiguous tone of the setting leaves  you wondering whether this is some terrifyingly contrived job  interview, a stumbling set of bureaucratic hurdles for some simple  administrative task, or something much darker. This thematic elusiveness  leaves a startling taste in your mouth as the piece draws to a close,  with a stark ending completely paralysing the audience.

Elsa’s movement, ranging from dance to clownery, is tight,  controlled, and deftly used to create a fable that is half about  bureaucracy and half about objectification. No moment is wasted, and the  show revels in toying with its audience’s personal frustrations about  being left on hold. This comes in perfect balance with fantastic  physical comedy and callbacks that create a masterfully multi-layered  piece.

Recommended Drink: Pair this with a Hard Seltzer –  sharp, bubbly, but leaving you with a strikingly frustrating amount of  clarity somehow all the while.

The Sensemaker and its production company  Woman’s Move are duly announced as the recipients of the ‘Binge Fringe  Best of Catania OFF Fringe 2024’ Award.

“The Sensemaker”, un divertissement per fermarsi a pensare

Rappresentato più di cento volte in sei lingue differenti e nonostante i quattordici premi internazionali collezionati, “The Sensemaker” di e con Elsa Couvreur a tutta prima si presenta come un divertissement. Forse  un provino, forse un colloquio di lavoro, la giovane performer, in  dichiarata tenuta da ufficio, interpreta un personaggio un po’  intimidito e un po’ spaesato dalla mono direzionalità della voce  metallica di una segreteria telefonica. Alternandosi all’intramontabile  “Inno alla Gioia”, le intima, quasi, di fare questo o di fare quello,  senza nulla concedere all’umana molteplicità. Quel che ne vien fuori è, anzi  tutto, un esilarante pezzo si comicità muta, tanto surreale, quanto  capace di intercettare un’esperienza inevitabilmente occorsa a ciascuno  di noi, contattando i vari numeri verdi alla ricerca di  un’assistenza spesso filtrata dalle unilaterali indicazioni di un nastro  registrato. Efficacissima, la mimica della Couvreur, che, al fisico asciutto e compostissimo della ballerina classica, affianca occhi enormi a spalancarsi esterrefatti o a roteare increduli nel difficilissimo  tentativo di ricordare ed eseguire correttamente le sempre più complesse  e astruse richieste dell’asettico speaker.

Inevitabile empatizzare e sorridere con lei;  inevitabile non lasciarsi portar via dai suoi giochi pindarici, nel  tentativo d’ingannar l’attesa e spezzare tensione e noia… Sì, ma poi tutto cambia – e quel ch’era iniziata come una bagatelle, smette i panni lunari del gioco, sia pur, a tratti, graffiante, per inaspettatamente metterci di fronte alla nudità delle nostre coscienze. E noi: cosa saremmo disposti a fare pur di raggiungere i nostri  intenti? Fin dove saremmo pronti a spingerci, pur con tutte le remore  del caso? Così il gioco si volge in micro dramma. La sua umanissima  recalcitranza meravigliosamente traspare attraverso i gesti pur minimali  e muti; e quella supplica degli occhi, al tempo stesso umanissima e  disumana, si fa urgenza di fronte allo sguardo inevitabilmente voyeur del pubblico. Idea vincente, poi, è quella di affidarsi pressoché solo alla gestualità, giocando con le impostazioni linguistiche già normalmente previste nei vari alberi di navigazione dei numeri verdi. Questo, l’éscamotage le consente di travalicare i limiti della lingua, rendendo lo spettacolo fruibile ovunque.

Complici le luci e l’atmosfera surreale, verrebbe da chiosare: un piccolo meraviglioso Au clair de la Lune, per la rarefazione della temperie, ma capace, una volta guadagnato il pubblico, di aprirlo, pur sempre sdrammatizzando, alla riflessione sui limiti etici della propria ambizione.

Concludiamo questo primo racconto del weekend del 27-29 settembre con un  altro lavoro per interprete solista, visto ancora negli spazi di  Isolacasateatro: The Sensemaker, di e con Elsa Couvreur,  che vuole affrontare in modo provocatorio e ironico la relazione tra  esseri umani e tecnologia. In scena, quasi in proscenio, una piccola  etager con un telefono anni Settanta, a fondo scena una sedia.  L’interprete belga sembra entrare in un ambiente come chi deve visitare  una casa per acquistarla, spaesata, fuori posto.
Elegante e ben truccata, la performer dapprima gioca a mimare con i  gesti che sembrano provenire dal linguaggio dei segni una serie di  tracce sonore di tono piuttosto vario, per entrare poi in dialogo con un  risponditore automatico che darà il via alla vera e propria vicenda  narrata nello spettacolo e che vuole concentrarsi sulla crescente  disumanizzazione che emerge nel contesto di un mondo sempre più dominato  dalla burocrazia digitale e dalle intelligenze artificiali, in cui le  persone si ritrovano inesorabilmente intrappolate in processi alienanti e  frustranti.

La donna, dicevamo, si confronta per tutta la seconda parte della  creazione con una voce automatizzata, una sorta di “assistente virtuale”  che le detta una serie di istruzioni, come se la protagonista stesse  partecipando a una sorta di selezione del personale. La protagonista  tenta di soddisfare le richieste burocratiche della voce robotica,  eseguendo compiti apparentemente semplici ma che diventano via via più  complessi e assurdi.
Quello che all’inizio sembra un normale processo di interazione con un  sistema automatizzato – come quelli che usiamo per prenotare  appuntamenti o ricevere assistenza tecnica – si trasforma lentamente in  un incubo kafkiano, affidato alla gestione mimica (invero notevolissima)  dell’attrice, che fa diventare il personaggio, via via, emblema  dell’individuo contemporaneo, costretto a sottomettersi a un mondo in  cui la tecnologia assume un ruolo opprimente e orwelliano.
Ogni tentativo di eseguire i compiti diventa una sfida impossibile: la  tecnologia diventa una trappola e per inseguirla l’essere umano perde il  controllo sulla propria vita. Ben si apprezzano, nella recitazione, le  radici di Couvreur nel teatro fisico e nella performance, che le  permettono di costruire lo spettacolo attraverso un linguaggio corporeo  estremamente ricco, preciso e disciplinato.
Una delle caratteristiche distintive di The Sensemaker è  infatti l’assenza di dialoghi umani. Tutta la comunicazione avviene tra  la protagonista, che non parla, e la voce automatizzata. Il silenzio  della protagonista è compensato da una grande abilità nei movimenti, nei  gesti e nelle espressioni facciali, che raccontano e coinvolgono più di  qualsiasi testo possibile, fino a un culmine drammatico che mette la  donna di fronte al conflitto con la propria morale. The Sensemaker è senza dubbio uno spettacolo accessibile a un pubblico internazionale,  ed è già stato applaudito in molti festival, per l’uso appropriato  di linguaggi diversi, che spaziano dal teatro fisico alla danza, dalla  mimica quasi clownesca alla performance drammatica, coinvolgendo  pubblico e critica, come è accaduto anche in queste repliche milanesi.
Pur allungandosi in una sorta di doppio finale che invero nulla aggiunge  a quanto detto (ed è quindi superfluo ai fini della resa scenica), lo  spettacolo resta comunque una delle visioni più interessanti del Milano  Off Fringe 24 e ci sentiamo di consigliarne la visione (ed eventualmente  anche la programmazione).

Die One-Woman-Show «The Sensemaker» erzählte vergangenen Freitag in der Bachturnhalle

vom Kampf einer Frau mit dem Telefonbeantworter und warf gesellschaftskritische

Fragen auf.

Annina Schmuki

SCHAFFHAUSEN. Hintenrechts auf der Bühne steht ein schwarzer Stuhl. In der gegenüberliegenden Ecke befindet sich ein altes Telefon mit einer Drehscheibe. Es ist Freitagabend, und in der Bachturnhalle warten die Zuschauenden gespannt auf den Beginn des Tanztheaters «The Sensemaker». Langsam verdunkelt sich der Raum. Nur noch die Bühne ist beleuchtet. Plötzlich klingelt schrill das Telefon. Die Tänzerin Elsa Couvreur stellt sich in die Mitte der Bühne. Nun ertönt eine Roboterstimme: «Guten Tag. Unsere Mitarbeiter sind zurzeit nicht verfügbar. Bitte warten Sie! Danke!» Danach erklingt Musik. Die Darstellerin, in eine grüne Bluse und einen schwarzen Rock gekleidet, mit Pumps und einer strengen Frisur, setzt sich auf den Stuhl und wartet. Ihre Handtasche platziert sie auf den Knien und hält den Henkel fest umklammert. Gebannt wartet das Publikum auf das Ende der Warteschlaufe. Der Roboterstimme ausgeliefert Gegenstand der einstündigen Darbietung ist das Duell zwischen einer jungen Frau und einem Telefonbeantworter. Die Protagonistin möchte eine Bewerbungabgeben.Jedochwirdsie immer wieder um Geduld gebeten und

mit Musik beim Warten vertröstet. Anfangs verharrt die Frau brav auf dem Stuhl sitzend. Doch mit jeder neuen Warteschlaufe wird sie ungeduldiger.

Kleine Bewegungen mit den Händen zur Musik werden nach und nach durch grössere Bewegungen und schliesslich von einem Tanz abgelöst. Das Stück wirft kritische Fragen auf das Interagieren des Menschen mit technischen Errungenschaften. Wie schnell akzeptiert unsereins Datenschutzbedingungen, damit der Prozess rasch vorangetrieben werden kann. Ebenfalls infrage gestellt wird der grosse Administrationsapparat, welcher den Bewerbungsprozesslangwierigund umständlich macht. Die Protagonistin ist einem komplizierten, normierten Prozess ausgeliefert, welcher durch eine Maschine emotions- und kompromisslos ausgeführt wird. Machtlos und vulnerabel ist sie der Roboterstimme ausgeliefert und gezwungen, jede noch so schikanierende Bedingung zu erfüllen, um ihr Ziel zu erreichen. Trotz der zum Nachdenken anregenden Thematik bringt die Show das Publikum immer wieder zum Schmunzeln. So sorgte die lästige Sprachauswahl, welche sich die Protagonistin beim zweiten Mal gar nicht mehr anhört und dadurch prompt auf der Leitung für eine Sprache landet, die sie gar nicht versteht, für ordentliches Gelächter.

Vier Awards

Die One-Woman-Show «The Sensemaker» stellt ein Projekt der Gruppe für zeitgenössischen Tanz «Woman’s Move» dar. Eine 30-minütige Kurzversion feierte 2017 in Genf ihre Premiere. Für das «Voila!Europe»-Festival in London entstand ein Jahr später eine längere Version, welche seither in vielen verschiedenen europäischen Ländern aufgeführt und mit vier Awards ausgezeichnet wird.

Elsa Couvreur übersetzt Kafkas bedrohliche Irrläufe ins Zeit-

alter der Digitalisierung.

Nummer 3654782 wurde einbestellt, um das bereits als erfolgreicheingestufte bürokratische Erstverfahren mit einer physischen Unterbeweisstellung der noch nicht abgefragten Eigenschaften

und Begabungen zu komplettieren. Herausgeputzt zum Bewerbungsgespräch, also anständig adrett, steht Elsa Couvreur in einem spartanischen Raum. Ein Stuhl, ein Telefontisch, that’s it. Die digitale, abgehackt formulierende Stimme ermahnt sie zur Geduld und spielt Beethovens «Ode an die Freude» in Dauerschlaufe. Warten also. Erst steht sie brav da, beginnt sich aber die immer länger werdende Zeit mit Kleinstregungen zu verkürzen, bis die Stimme sie darauf hinweist, dass der Raum aus Qualitätsgründen überwacht würde. Ertappt, errötet sie kurzerhand, was von dieser Überwachungssoftware offenbar als Signal gedeutet wird, im Prozess fortzufahren. Erst werden ihr grenzwertige Zugeständnisse abgerungen, wobei allein Ja als Antwort überhaupt zur Disposition steht. Und wie wenn dieses Bekenntnis zur vollständigen Selbstaufgabe nicht schon demütigend genug wäre, wechselt die Stimme von der Frage zur Aufforderung. Von vorn, im Profil, von hinten, etc, ergäbe ja grundlegend noch irgend einen Sinn, zumindest, da überhaupt nicht festgelegt ist, um wel-

cherart Auswahlverfahren es sich hier überhaupt handelt. Aber als die Aufforderung in eine absurd

lange Anweisung von zu vollbringenden Kunststücken und Symbolbewegungsabläufen mündet, die sie souverän wie gewünscht abspult und die Stimme sie bestimmt und unausweichlich dazu auffordert, sich kurzerhand auch noch real splitternackt zu präsentieren, ist jeder Ansatz von Belustigung

weggewischt. Die Marionette Mensch, die sich digital genauso wie auf einer Karriereleiter alles bieten, wegnehmen und sich manipulieren lassen muss, um überhaupt als existierend zu gelten, steht hier in einer überaus agilen Version als Spiegel da und weckt Widerstandsgeister. froh.

«The Sensemaker», 19.11.,Tanzfestival, Winterthur.

Guest reviewer Sparky Backman Juliff reviews Anchor at the Mercury Theatre as part of the Colchester Fringe.

Anchor
Mercury Theatre, Colchester Fringe Festival

4 stars

Anchor is a unique performance that represents the complexities of  relationships, the ups the downs and everything in between. This  performance is very physical, a mix of theatre and dance. It starts with  the actors, Elsa Couvreur and Mehdi Duman, from ‘Divisar’ and ‘Woman’s  Move’,Geneva, Switzerland, dragging each other across the stage floor  with most of their clothing scattered around. They later go on to play  hide and seek together but it doesn’t go that well. Mehdi pulled me up  on stage while Elsa was still counting with her eyes closed and when she  was done counting, she tried to find Mehdi, with her eyes still closed  and he hid behind me while moving us around the stage. When Elsa finally  found me and when she was just about to kiss me, (thinking i was Mehdi)  she opened her eyes and was very confused at first but then realised it  was her partners doing. I think their use of clothes as props was  really clever and…interesting. Overall, a beautiful and intriguing  performance that I truly enjoyed watching.

Le collectif de danse contemporaine Woman’s Move nous sommait, joyeusement toutefois, de faire preuve de Patience. Et ce, une heure durant, sans utiliser nos écrans. Cette méditation, artistique, a pris place du 4 au 7 octobre 2023, à l’Étincelle, au cœur de la maison de quartier de la Jonction. Derrière le titre de cette nouvelle performance, l’on trouvait de soigneux pas de danse, des rires et des étincelles de réflexion.

Si l’on recensait les rires, justement, qui ont encensé la salle de l’Étincelle ce soir-là… on dirait alors que le public n’a pas simplement assisté à la performance du collectif Woman’s Move mais très activement participé à ce spectacle qui faisait la part belle à la danse contemporaine.

C’était mieux avant ou presque

Iels chantent Eye of the tiger si l’on quitte la salle (car iels sont attentif·ve·s), iels nous montrent les longues soirées autour des feux de camp (car iels savent s’occuper intelligemment), iels se rapprochent, se fondent puis se chamaillent (car iels n’ont pas peur d’être ensemble). Comme si tout avait été chassé, balayé par l’arrivée du smartphone perturbateur ? « Comme si… », « puisque… » ou « à cause… » ? La question restera ouverte.

Et iels s’expriment en dansant. Mouvements de groupe, monologues menés à la baguette ou combat comme sur un ring, le collectif sait varier les formes pour rendre ses spectateurs·ice·s fous/folles de lui. De façon régulière, tous se retrouvent au centre du plateau pour jouer une pub de jus de fruits aux saveurs de cowboy sur un cheval (Si, si !). Elle entrecoupe la pièce, à la manière des publicités sur un compte Spotify gratuit (Oh les vilain·e·s !). L’on sent bien la critique à l’égard de toutes nos occupations virtuelles, parfois peu intelligentes.

On apprécie cette plongée virevoltante dans des questions (très, très) sérieuses comme celles de la cyberdépendance, de l’utilisation des écrans et de l’occupation du temps libre. Chaud devant ! Le rythme est parfaitement adapté aux thématiques de la pièce : ça bouge, zappe dans tous les sens et ne semble jamais s’arrêter comme si l’on scrollait de façon éternelle. La patience semble avoir certes disparu, mais est sans cesse convoquée sur scène. Iels évoquent de multiples souvenirs dans toute la splendeur de leur lenteur : soirées autour des feux de camp, valses timides après ces quelques heures passées dans l’intimité des flammes… Le théâtre fait irruption dans la danse.

Un bon danseur sachant danser …

L’origine de Woman’s Move remonte à 2012. Il regroupe des danseuses et danseurs, toutes et tous doté·e·s, parallèlement à leur fidélité à la danse, d’aptitudes spéciales comme le catch ou le clown… Et iels le laissent transparaître pour le plus grand plaisir du public. Le clown est celui qui sait rebondir face à toutes les réactions du public, même les plus incongrues, et qui n’hésite pas, non plus, à déranger son public par des questions bizarres. Il est rare de voir des spectacles qui mêlent les arts avec une telle fluidité. C’est comme si le langage n’avait pas, cette fois-ci, le dernier mot. Les espérances et doutes des danseuses et danseurs sont portées par leur corps, l’humour et la grâce qu’iels véhiculent d’ailleurs si bien au travers de ce dernier.

C’est si fort qu’on perd parfois le fil du récit et qu’on aurait apprécié que la voix off du début nous accompagne plus longtemps encore tout au long du spectacle. Un brin de sérieux, quelque chose de vraiment calme.

Au-delà de l’aspect jovial conféré à la performance, vous l’aurez compris, on ressort enfin doté de ce rare trait de caractère pour un contemporain des années 2020 : la patience. Et l’on sent qu’iels étaient déterminé·e·s à faire percuter le public au travers d’un divertissement musclé. Ah, bien sûr, le côté catch(y?)…!

Einn þeirra fjölmörgu listamanna sem nú leggja leið sína til okkar  ískalda og ónotalega lands til að taka þátt í Fringe-listahátíð í  Reykjavík er Elsa Couvreur frá Woman’s Move í Sviss. Hún sýndi í dag  fyrri sýningu sína af einleiknum The Sensemaker í Mengi við Óðinsgötu, sú seinni verður á föstudaginn kl. 17 á sama stað.

„Sensemaker“ … kannski er átt við þann sem reynir að fá vit út úr  vitleysunni. Alltént rímar sú þýðing vel við innihald einleiksins sem  fjallar um samskipti ungrar konu við vélmenni í síma eða öðru  fjarskiptatæki. Smám saman kemur í ljós að hún er að sækja um starf,  sennilega við leiklist eða einhvers konar sviðslistir, og lengi framan  af má hún bíða eftir að komast að – „allir þjónustufulltrúar okkar eru  uppteknir eins og er, vinsamlegast bíðið“, eins og vélmennið endurtekur  með reglulegu millibili.

Meðan hún bíður er leikin músak-útgáfa af Óðnum til gleðinnar. Þar er  verulega illa farið með gott tónverk! En í djúpum leiða sínum fer  stúlkan að bregðast við hinni vélrænu tónlist og leika á hana – með  texta (af bandi) og skemmtilegum vélrænum eða hálf-vélrænum  handahreyfingum í takti við textann. Lengi dansar hún þannig með efri  hluta líkamans en neðri hlutinn, í sínu þrönga pilsi og hælaháu skóm, er  kyrr eins og myndastytta. Það var bæði flott og fyndið.

Gamanið varð smám saman æði grátt eftir að stúlkan náði loks sambandi  við vélmennið og fór að hlýða boðum þess, stuttum og (yfirleitt) skýrum  framan af en flóknari þegar á leið. Hápunktur leiksins var þegar  vélmennið fór með svo löng fyrirmæli að áhorfendur voru löngu búnir að  missa þráðinn en stúlkan hafði lagt allt á minnið og fór eftir  skipununum í einu og öllu þótt býsna galnar væru. Þá er vélmennið orðið  nokkuð glatt með viðfangið en enn þarf hún að sanna hversu hlýðin hún  er: hún fær skipun um að hátta sig. Úr öllu.

Þetta er, þrátt fyrir skopið, sterkt og óþægilegt verk sem talar  beint inn í „me-too“ bylgjuna og minnir á andstyggilegu sögurnar sem  stúlkur í sviðslistum (og æðimörgum öðrum atvinnugreinum) hafa sagt á  undanförnum árum. Það gerir The Sensemaker ennþá ónotalegri að  viðmælandi stúlkunnar skuli vera vél. Við getum bara ímyndað okkur  hverjir eru á bak við hana. Eða hvað er á seyði ef enginn er á bak við  hana.

Elsa Couvreur er afskaplega falleg stúlka sem skapaði sannfærandi  persónu með svipbrigðum sínum og látæði. Hún er góður dansari og  látbragðsleikari og ég er ekkert hissa á öllum þeim aragrúa verðlauna  sem einleikurinn hennar hefur hlotið víða um heim. Það eru ekki mörg  sæti í Mengi og betra að kaupa miða strax á seinni sýninguna.

The winner of this year’s Best in Fringe managed to transform talking to  an answering machine into a thought-provoking examination of  powerlessness.

After 11 days of the Dunedin event, which ended on Sunday, adjudicators selected The Sensemaker for its top award.

The one-woman show was described as a "dystopian battle between a woman and an answering machine".

The show’s creator and performer Elsa Couvreur, who brought it to  Dunedin from her home in Geneva, was glad it struck a chord with Dunedin  audiences.

"It’s so nice to see that this show that I created in Europe five  years ago can reach audiences here in Dunedin five years later, and it  seems to be relevant for people who watch it, and it’s so nice to be  rewarded for that," Ms Couvreur said.

Her act explored "powerlessness" as her character interacted with a faceless answering machine.

"I can’t remember how I got the idea for it, but I started to play  with automated voices and got the storyline of waiting on the phone."

The Dunedin Fringe Festival was at the top of Ms Couvreur’s list when planning her tour with the show.

"I looked at the programme from the Dunedin Fringe last year and thought it would fit right in."

Co-director of the festival Kate Schrader thought the show was a "beautiful piece".

"It was very fringey."

mark.john@odt.co.nz

Fringe award winners

Visual art: City Planners 2023 
Dance/physical theatre: The Sensemaker
Comedy: Presentation is Everything
Dunedin favourite comedian: Tama Alexander (Fresher)
Music: TwentyNineteen
Theatre: Dark Radio
Outstanding performer: Marea Colombo
Outstanding emerging talent: Tama Alexander (Fresher)
Outstanding design: Lamb to the Slaughter
Outstanding technical achievement: Dark Radio City of Literature ‘‘Beyond Words’’: Wonderful
Most promising Pacific artist: Rosie Roache
Phil Davison special contribution to festival life: Gareth McMillan
Warwick Broadhead Memorial: City Planners 2023
NZ Touring: Out at Sea
Best in fringe: The Sensemaker

Unique, complex, enigmatic - don't miss it

Don’t miss this one! After multiple performances internationally and several in New Zealand, the reputation of The Sensemaker has preceded it, so it has a lot to live up to, and it does not disappoint.

Woman’s Move is a contemporary dance company, its  Swiss-based collective co-directed by Iona D’Annunzio and Elsa Couvreur.  It is Couvreur who in 2017-18 conceived The Sensemaker and who directs and performs her own striking solo show, originally with the French title Apres le bip Sonore(After the beep sounds).

It is not clear at first that this is a dance work,  for the actor enters in business clothes, walking very tall and straight  and sitting primly, not moving a muscle. An old-style telephone rings,  asserting itself as a second actor in what ensues as a battle of wits  between human and machine. When the actor doesn’t speak into the phone,  doesn’t leave a message when asked (‘After the beep’), she is bombarded  with a random series of voices in different accents: a comic babble of  unrelated snippets with no coherent thread.

The subject makes no attempt to ‘answer’ the phone,  but stays to listen to the recorded message in a loop with endless musak  repeating – for much of the time (wonderfully ironic) Beethoven’s Ode to Joy banged  out on a cheap keyboard. Although one anticipates, on the basis of  collective experience, that the repetitive music and messages will drive  the person to boredom or worse – irritation, teeth-chomping  exasperation, anger perhaps – that doesn’t happen. It can’t, because  that would make for a very short dance/play.

The title After the beep sounds would have  indicated this simpler scenario, where a person wanting to speak with a  human keeps getting fobbed off and either gives up or screams at the  thing. That is not what we’ve got. It seems the main agent in the piece  is not the woman on the receiving end, but the disembodied voice of an  answerphone giving her a reference number for her ‘request’ and telling  her to do stuff.  Quite a lot of stuff. This instructive mode becomes  more and more domineering, until you’d think she would give up and  leave. She doesn’t.

Some of the text is very funny, an absurdist satire  on interview techniques: the crazy and irrelevant questions you get  asked, especially if you are a woman. The automated Englishwoman seems  to be investigating the subject’s ‘skills’ and aptitude for life itself –  or a non-existent job. The toneless, disjointed voice typifies the  dehumanization of our current processes in telecoms – and much else.  There is something in this of Orwell’s 1984. There are also  echoes of the casting couch for this woman who has to bare all to get  where she wants to go. Some of the commands have the character of insult  or assault – not funny at all.

The woman, however, is equal to all this. In a  climactic series, after the machine has made its instructions and  endorsed her responses many times over, it launches into a set of  increasingly bizarre commands with no pauses between them. She stands,  staring into space… and then, a little time later executes every single  one of the commands, contorting her body in a machine-like way, obedient  to the letter. She gets her own back! After this, a subversive comedy  comes increasingly to the fore.

The liberation of the body into dance also happens  gradually. While performing all the exercises she’s supposed to, the  woman takes it away at many points; flying off into the wings, she has  to be reminded to move to the centre of the room so she can continue to  be filmed. The first twitchings of muscles were so slight, you had to  notice them – the subtlest sideways nudges keeping time with the rhythm  in Ode to Joy, more fluid movements evolving with other pop music on the swell-chosen soundtrack.

This unique work may be complex and enigmatic (some  may say chaotic), but its leading agent, the dancer, is not dismayed.  Finally, after the most tortuous mental and bodily progression, she  earns the title of Sensemaker, which is more than any machine can do.

Copyright © belongs to the reviewer

The sensemaker is a young woman on the phone and being watched by a camera.

She has a request of some kind - her clothing and initial air of fragile confidence suggest that she’s applying for a job.

For much of the time she’s on hold, and for much of that time the music is Beethoven’s Ode to Joy,  out of which all the joy is very quickly squeezed. Her facial  expressions and body language tell us how she’s feeling as she waits for  the interaction to begin.

Interaction with the presumably artificial intelligence at the other  end consists of non-negotiable instructions which the sensemaker must  follow to the letter, accepting all conditions and affirming that she is  not a robot. At first the instructions seem merely stupid and  nonsensical, but as matters progress they become humiliating and  dehumanising.

Everyone who has had an online or phone experience that goes on and  on, and yet nowhere (and that has to be all of us) will know about utter  helplessness and frustration turning to fury. The sensemaker’s goal,  whatever it is, is so important to her that she dare not give up.

The play comes to Dunedin from Geneva, Switzerland, and is presented  by Elsa Couvreur. It’s physical theatre, and Couvreur relies on movement  to convey the sensemaker’s responses to the phone’s insistent and  non-negotiable demands. She dances, she touches her toes; her body does  what is required while her face conveys her progress from initial  hopefulness to loathing and disgust for a system that has brought her to  this.

You could see The Sensemaker as a dark comedy for our time, an  expression of the dread people feel when faced with the prospect of any  sort of electronic contact with authority, or a warning about the  future. Whatever the case, the spirit of Kafka lives on.

Have you ever waited on the phone for way too long, with repetitive  muzak playing on a loop and an irritating robotic voice telling you  endlessly that your request is being processed?

We’ve all been there, and the main protagonist in The Sensemaker details this particularly tedious and annoying journey until she is gradually stretched beyond her limits.

This hilariously entertaining display of theatre and dance takes us  through a dystopian battle between women and machine as the play details  the effects of new technologies and our bureaucratic systems on our  lives.

The audience shares this journey with the protagonist from the highs  and lows to times when you’ll be laughing and covering your eyes with  shock, this show has it all.

This crafty mix of dance and theatre tells the audience the story of  this dystopian relationship. We laugh but at the same time, we are  invited to reflect on our relationship with technology. A suspended  metaphor that entertains and frightens us at the same time.

This show will have you laughing, dancing along to the music and completely entertained for the whole hour.

This show is not kid friendly! As we approach the end of the tale,  the show takes a raunchy yet hilarious turn that is strictly for adult  eyes only.

Unfortunately, the space is not particularly well-lit so it does  become difficult to see the full extent of the act and the story is slow  to start and a little hard to follow in the beginning.

The Sensemaker is a clever and intricate show that touches on relevant issues in a hilariously entertaining way.

This is certainly a show you will want to see before this year’s Fringe season ends.

Reviewed by Maddison Howell.

How long are you prepared to wait on the  phone? How many looped menus do you tolerate? Are you patient? How  willing are you to accept instructions from a phone bot? What do you do  while you’re on hold? The Sensemaker will help you answer such  questions. It may also leave you with an uneasy feeling that this  nonsense is in its infancy and could get much worse.

The Sensemaker is a wonderful  solo show that puts the spotlight on an issue that has exploded in very  recent times – just what should our relationship be with bots. And Elsa  Couvreur does so in such a glorious and graceful fashion. In an unusual  combination of dance and comedy she commands attention from the outset.  Every sideways glance, every twitch of a finger, every sigh, is  calculated and intended to convey meaning. She is riveting to watch.

Couvreur shows inexhaustible patience as  we endure the endless wait for her ‘request to be processed.’ She comes  up with some very inventive ways to pass the time and amuse herself and  us before things get a bit weird and the phone bot would appear to be  very much overstepping the mark. The caller needs to decide whether she  wants to continue to have her ‘request processed’.

This clever show takes what is normally  private behaviour into a very public space, and does so with subtle  humour, and an abundance of elegance.

Countless hours have gone into the  preparation of the many layers of pre-recorded messages and on-hold  music. Clever use of multiple languages and the ironic use of  Beethoven’s Ode to Joy may mean you’ll never here it the same way again.

A magnificent show displaying mastery of  the technical and artistic sides of theatre. Superb entertainment that  also throws up just so many questions. Deserves a much larger audience –  spread the word.

4.5 stars

Michael Coghlan

The Sensemaker continues at The Garage International @Adelaide Town Hall at various times until Sat 18 Mar.

The Sensemaker is one of those shows where at first I think "Oh God, what did I get myself into," but by the end that thought changes to "Oh God, that was absolutely incredible."

A dystopian comedy drama, the story details a woman's job interview, it entirely done through some kind of automated AI system. The performance starts out quite slow, but this only helps to heighten the tension when the requests and demands of the machine become increasingly outlandish.

There are some hilarious moments, including a few many of us who have gone to important job interviews or dealt with automated systems may relate to, but ultimately this is a very powerful, relevant, and sometimes extremely confronting performance.

I felt it was about how as the world becomes more automated, the more dehumanised we become. After all, can we expect mechanised systems to respect our humanity when they have none of their own?

This is a one woman performance, though technically a telephone is a co-star. In fact, the voice over for the phone has far more lines than the woman, who only speaks about two words throughout the entire show.

Fortunately, she is a brilliant physical actor, expressing so much humanity and emotion through her body movements, facial expressions, and occasionally (very entertaining) dancing. We feel her frustration, her awkwardness, her humiliation, and want her to come out on top.

I should note that there is a scene some people may find very uncomfortable, but I feel it was important to the narrative.

An absolutely remarkable piece of theater, I cannot recommend The Sensemaker enough.

Fascinatingly unpredictable - a one in a thousand performance

Theatre reviewers should reserve certain adjectives for the rare cases when they are fully justified. Such a case is The Sensemaker,  taking the stage at the Gryphon. Extraordinary in its concept,  remarkable for its courage and almost painfully relevant, I cannot  praise this piece of theatre highly enough.

It’s described in the Fringe brochure as unclassifiable, further as a  dystopian battle between a woman and an answering machine. I ask a guy  behind me what drew him to the show. “I’ve been on hold for a week,” he  replies. He means telephonically speaking. “Coming to this show is a  kind of catharsis.”

Arguably perhaps, The Sensemaker is a catharsis for its  creator and performer, Elsa Couvreur, who hails from Switzerland. She  enters quietly from stage left, dressed smartly though conservatively.  On stage right is a telephone – the old-fashioned kind. These are our  only two players. That the ensuing dialogue should be so captivating is a  credit to them both.

When she doesn’t pick up the phone, she gets to hear the message.  It’s predictably mechanical and dehumanised. She gets given a number – a  serial number? – and from then on is referred to by it. This is  physical theatre, so we don’t get to hear the onstage performer’s voice,  but that imbalance is more than compensated for by the unrelenting  nature of the messages she and we are subjected to. There’s music while  she waits of course, and the audience is treated to an increasingly  frenzied dance while the phone pounds out a song about love and  understanding.

What’s fascinating about this performance is that we don’t know where  it’s headed. Why is our woman so willing to do what the machine tells  her to do, while clearly becoming demented by it? We think we know, and  then another mechanical instruction sends us in another direction. Told  to carry out a series of physical movements, our woman complies, even as  orders become more insistent, more bizarre and more unacceptable.

Is she really going to follow this one? The silence of the audience  is palpable. We’re as concerned as we are fascinated. The denouement  here is gaspingly unexpected: the chasm between bodiless dehumanising  and human vulnerability never more obvious, or more alarming.  This is a  one in a thousand performance. If you’re going to see only one show at  the Fringe Festival, make it this one.

Copyright © belongs to the reviewer

Imagine, if you will, a barren stage containing nothing but a chair, a  seat, and a home phone. With just a couple of simple elements, what  follows is a show based around an idea that is taken, flattened,  stretched, bent into a triangle shape, and then thrown off the side of a  building. It’s clever, it’s unusual, and it plays with awkwardness to  lengths you’d have never thought possible.

The Sensemaker is  a genre-bending solo performance from Elsa Couvreur (concept,  choreography, soundtrack) featuring the back-and-forth of an answering  machine robot and a woman waiting patiently. We can all relate to being  stuck on hold on for far too long whilst having to endure some form of  pop music or elevator chimes, but this show imagines just how bizarre  and extreme this scenario could become. What if instead of responding by  voice, you had to respond with claps? What if you had to agree to all  terms and conditions over the phone? What if you had to perform a dance  routine from High School Musical just to get your request submitted? In The Sensemaker, nothing is off the table. 

The show is as gripping as it is uncomfortable, with the performer  standing still on the stage waiting for extended periods of time. That’s  not to say that little is happening though; Couvreur knows exactly how  to use awkwardness in a way that provokes and keeps the audience on the  edge of their seats for the entire duration of the show. She is as  skilful a writer as she is a performer, having to utilise precise timing  to sync her movements and dance with the backing track that keeps The Sensemaker on course. 

We’re left to wonder – what exactly could she be waiting on the line  for that makes it worth jumping through so many hoops? After everything  that the performer goes through, let’s hope it’s for more than just to  cancel a flight.

Produced by ‘Woman’s Move’ from Switzerland and co-directed by  choreographers Elsa Couvreur and Iona D’Annunzio. The Sensemaker starts  as a clever and understated comedy that uses dance, movement and sound  as its main devices. Theatre like this is at its best when minimal and  perfectly timed, which is a key strength of The Sensemaker.

The Fringe programme describes the piece as a ‘dystopian battle between a woman and an answering machine.’

We have all had our patience tested when on hold, or jumping hoops of  a bureaucratic system. The waiting, the repetitive instructions and  music, the back and forwards between different departments, the  nonsensical automation, the feeling of not getting anywhere and just as  you are about to give up, a small moment of progress.

This show beautifully finds the light-hearted comedy of this  experience we all know and takes it to a surrealist realm. The  protagonist is committed to having their request acknowledged by the  mystery service. They remain resilient against every hurdle and we the  audience become invested in this with them experiencing all the joy of  their success and despair when they are challenged.

The piece reminded me of all the times we have to exercise  persistence in our lives and perhaps go beyond what may be necessary to  prove ourselves. The metaphor of the show brings out the anguish of job  interviews, auditions, navigating health systems and legislative  processes and brings to light the vulnerability we are exposed to when  our needs place power in something outside ourselves. This show makes us  ask the question ‘when is it enough?’ ‘when is it too much?’ and how  easy it is to go beyond what we are comfortable with once we feel we  have already invested so much of ourselves in an outcome.

Myself and my friends were moved from laughter to tears as the show  masterfully invited us to be a part of the journey and at times gave us  the unease of feeling complicit in the protagonist’s hurt.

It is innovative theatre like this that reminds me why I go to see  independent artists, so that we might see another way to experience the  world. I think being on hold will never be the same again.

The Sensemaker at Rehearsal Room 1 @ at State Theatre Centre of WA
Wednesday, February 1, 2023

10/10

The Sensemaker was a thought-provoking piece that mixed theatre and dance to shine a spotlight on the human condition in our current times.

The show commences with the  protagonist, (co-director and the show’s solo-star) Elsa Couvreur,  entering into a fully black space that is entirely bare except for a  phone situated at the very front left of the stage. As the audio  commences, the audience join Couvreur in a journey of that ever-familiar  and ultra-banal event we have all faced at one time or another, a phone  call dictated by an automated voice.

At first, Couvreur’s interaction  with the automated voice is playful and funny. But as time passes, the  requests of the automated voice appear to become authoritative and  invasive, pushing what the audience may at first perceive as comedic  satire into a deeper space of critical reflection.

Couvreur is a talented performer,  both as a dancer and an actor. Their ability to engage with the audience  and lead them on an emotional journey purely by their own actions and  the most minimal of props was exceptional. As the lights came up, the  audience was relatively muted and a shared sense of shock and concern  for what we had just witnessed could be felt around the theatre. This  level of impact is not common in theatre and served to show just how  strong and dominant Couvreur’s performance was.

While many of us are still struggling  to make sense of the world in the current post-COVID times, we can be  grateful for pieces like The Sensemaker that are at least trying to help piece things together for us.

The Sensemaker is an absolutely stunning piece of avant  garde theatre fused with dance. It’s a unique piece that questions the  very fabric of time, our sense of autonomy, ambitions, and the concept  of waiting. The set comprises of a rotary telephone and a single chair.  Waiting patiently is performer, Elsa Couvreur in neatly  presented office attire – a bit of a blank slate – anticipation  mounting in both her and the audience. Couvreur’s neutral face is lit up  with hope as the phone rings – shrill and jarring through the empty  space. What follows can only be described as pure genius. Moving to a  choreographed piece that loops around and around, the phone message  mixes and moves in a mash up of pop culture soundbytes from different  media. All the while, Couvreur continually moves – matching up each  segment with the familiar dance.

It’s a disarming and stunning examination of internalised motion –  each piece of popular culture imbibed in an almost ritualistic routine.  After this flurry of excitement there are intense silences and moments  of pure confusion and frustration. Couvreur is almost in a heightened  state of patience, never wavering, yet questioning notions of boredom.  Every time she attempts to take control or make an autonomous move, the  phone rings or a voice message puts her firmly back in her place.  Couvreur’s movements border on erratic at times, joyful and with gay  abandon at others. The huge sequence where she follows every ridiculous  instruction is so bizarre that it’s brilliant. It’s a scathing  commentary on how beaurocracy and authority control us while also  demonstrating Couvreur’s mini rebellion as she takes back a tiny bit of  herself in victory.

The Sensemaker is a surreal journey of autonomy and identity  with commentary on authority and structure that is also just a really  fun and confusing show. Don’t miss this call!

You can see The Sensemaker at the State Theatre Centre WA until 5th February 2023. 

Keep up with The Fourth Wall on Facebook and @fourth_wall_media on Instagram to see what we’re up to this FRINGEWORD 2023.

The Fourth Wall acknowledges the traditional custodians of the  land we engage in storytelling on – the Wadjhuk people of the Noongar  nation. We pay respects to their elders past, present, and emerging.

Engaging, provocative and seamlessly executed, The Sensemaker  presents a satirical journey of our solo protagonist experiencing  oh-so-dreaded phone call queues and built-in automated requests, which  gradually push her to her limits of comfort and patience.

This unique production exemplifies the power of physical theatre in  near complete absence of dialogue. Silently, the highly talented  performer effortlessly expresses herself in response to the numerous  audio cues, using only her body language, facial expressions and  expertly executed (and quite comical) mime and dance sequences.

While the momentum appeared unhurried at first, this tactic cleverly  immersed the audience into the narrative, evoking that feeling of  impatience and frustration that we all know too well. Spending an hour  in her shoes, we follow along with what at first appears to be your  everyday phone waiting queue, but this soon transforms into automated  instructions that well and truly crossed the line into absurdity and  discomfort, just to progress the call.

While the audience remains in the dark about the purpose for this  call and the identity of the robotic entity on the other line, we find  ourselves on this same journey. Delighted at her humour along the way  and becoming outraged at the hoops she needs to jump through, the  audience is motivated to reflect themselves - How far would I allow  myself to be pushed? How much am I willing to share? Is it really worth  it?

At times I felt we were transported to a darker, almost dystopian  future, where we as people are reduced to no more than a number, at the  mercy of a system we have built for the sake of ‘efficiency’, and most  jarringly, where privacy is an outdated concept. To me, this highly  relatable story hit a bit close to home as a poignant reflection on how  far we could progress into automation at the expense of real human  connection. This discomfort was juxtaposed by the absurdity of the  requests and how they were responded to which provided a continual  thread of ever-building comedic relief.

If you are seeking something quite alternative, thought provoking and  expertly produced, I would look no further than The Sensemaker. Noting  though…a content warning may be needed for those triggered by never  ending phone calls.

Solo  performer Elsa Couvreur turns the telephonic torment of being put on  hold into an hour of witty, spell-binding physical theatre. Rita  Clarke’s advice? Don’t miss it.

The Sensemaker, Woman's Move

State Theatre Centre, 31 January 2023

You’ll be hard pressed to find a more ravishing 60 minutes at Fringe World than The Sensemaker. It’s a one-woman show about the impotency and frustrations felt waiting on the phone, listening to repetitive music.

Yet Swiss performer Elsa Couvreur, who created the piece before the  pandemic, turns the torment into an ironic, humorous and subversive hour  of dance and physical theatre. She’s a performer who just looks into  the auditorium and holds an audience spellbound. Mind you, she’s pretty  spectacular to look at – as you’ll see if you go – and do go or you’ll  be sorry. The Sensemaker has won countless awards in eight European countries in five different languages and it’s easy to see why.

With the gait and posture of a top model, dressed, perhaps, for an  interview in a short black skirt, a soft blue shirt, black panty-hose  and stilettos, Couvreur walks onto a stage occupied only by a chair, a  desk and an old-fashioned cream telephone. She sits and waits  interminably until a robotic voice starts giving her rather inane  instructions, interspersed by Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”.

What makes this piece so enjoyable is its combination of dystopian,  disparate and seemingly incompatible elements. I mean, what would  Beethoven make of his “Ode to Joy” being used as the wallpaper music  played to placate waiting customers?

Actually, I think he’d be delighted – firstly on a commercial front,  secondly because Couvreur dances so ecstatically to its refrain, and  thirdly because the work is so thoroughly engaging. There’s the anomaly  of her role in which she never speaks but lip-syncs to the demands  delivered in German, French, Dutch Spanish Italian and English. And  though The Sensemaker is billed as physical theatre there are  many moments of silence and inactivity, where you are still,  inconceivably, totally mesmerised.

To top it all off, there’s the robotic voice, cultured and pleasant  but relentlessly demanding and at the end, inappropriate. To quote  Couvreur afterwards, “The people behind the machine are evil but the  machine isn’t.” What’s frustrating is that you have no way of getting to  those people, evil or not.

The Sensemaker hits a nerve and does it with wit, polish, and cerebral aplomb. If there’s a lesson in The Sensemaker,  it might be that there’s rapture to be found even in our worst moments.  Especially if you could have Couvreur around – she’s brilliant.

Most of us have felt the  utter frustration of being at the mercy of waiting on the phone for a  seemingly endless amount of time, with an automated, robotic voice  making the experience ever the more excruciating.

It  is the bane of administrative processes that do not make sense and  takes centre stage in The Sensemaker, a concept and performance by Elsa  Couvreur that combines theatre and dance, featuring in State Theatre  Centre of WA’s State of Play program at Fringe World 2023.

Initially  created as a shorter version in 2017 for the Théâtre de l’Abri in  Geneva, Couvreur saw the potential to extend the work to tell a more  interesting story.

“I had the opportunity to do that for the Voilà! Europe Theatre Festival in London,” she explains.

“As  for the original idea, it came from me playing around with automatic  voices and answering machine sounds on the web. The concept and message  appeared as I was putting together some of the voices and then I dug  more and more into it.”

“The simplest way to  explain it is: I’m on hold and struggling with admin processes or  customer services. However, it is hard to pinpoint exactly where my  character is and what she wants. This was intentional as I like the  audience to be able to relate to the feeling of vulnerability and  helplessness without restricting them to a specific situation. It’s open  to interpretation.”

The  Sensemaker has since been performed more than 70 times in 10 different  countries and five different languages as a solo show featuring Couvreur  as the protagonist, although there is a big contribution from the  automated voices in this bureaucratic dystopia.

Couvreur’s  instinct to leave her character unrestricted from a specific situation  has contributed to the show’s universality, providing audiences from  different cultures and backgrounds a way to relate to it, since everyone  is familiar with the feeling to some degree.

“I love sharing the show with the audience and seeing their reactions, which have been so different,” she says.

“On  an artistic level, it is a fun challenge to captivate an audience as  the show relies on subtle movements and minimalist acting, which means  that every show is slightly different.”

Couvreur started her dance education at the Royal Ballet School Antwerp,  Belgium, when she was 15, going on to the Ballet Junior of Geneva for  three years before working as a dancer for several Swiss-based companies  and as a choreographer for Geneva-based collective, Woman’s Move.

She began co-directing  Woman’s Move in 2012 with Iona D’Annunzio, the pair combining forces to  create shows separately but with a common structure of blending physical  theatre and contemporary dance, and sharing the administrative  workload.

“Iona and I both wish to present shows that tackle social issues in an accessible way,” she says.

“That’s  why we use humour, to help engage and reach an audience which may not  be familiar with dance or theatre. But ultimately, people will take  whatever they want from the show and I have no control upon it, nor  should I.”

The  Sensemaker joins a jam-packed State of Play program of music, circus,  comedy, cabaret, theatre and dance at State Theatre Centre of WA,  following its Fringe World 2022 Best Independent Hub Award win.

The 2023 program features 30 shows running from January 20 to February 5, across four main spaces at the venue.

The Sensemaker is at Rehearsal Room 1, State Theatre Centre of WA, January 31 to February 5.

THE SENSEMAKER. 5 STARS.

From Switzerland came the tightest, most controlled and  thought-provoking show I’ve seen in a while. It’s basically one woman  versus an answering machine, being on hold, having to carry out  instructions, and the sheer frustration of hanging on the telephone. All  mimed and lip synced, it made me think of DWP applicants being treated  brutally as they try to apply for benefits, its multi-language aspect  made me think it was a bold satire on the EU and red tape, and when she  was naked, I felt she was being measured for a concentration camp.  Brilliantly on the right side of frustrating, this was Fringe theatre at  its finest.

Questionner la place du genre dans notre société de manière ludique, c’est ce
que propose Stéréo-Genre, imaginée et chorégraphiée par Iona D’Annunzio. Au travers d’un univers coloré et dynamique, inspiré des jeux de notre enfance, le collectif Woman’s Move se produira

les 11, 14 et 15 mai prochains au Théâtre de L’Oriental à Vevey.

Texte de Lara Liard
Propos recueillis auprès de Iona D’Annunzio, chorégraphe, et Elsa Couvreur, assistante et interprète, co-fondatrices du collectif Woman’s Move

La pièce Stéréo-Genre réunit six danseur∙euse∙s dans un jeu à taille humaine. Twister, pierre-feuille-ciseaux ou encore le snake, c’est au travers de ces jeux classiques multigénérationnels que Iona D’Annunzio vise tous les publics. Des jeux de lumières ainsi que des habits colorés plongent les spectateur∙trice∙s dans un univers de jeux vidéo, voire de super-héros, des années 90. La chorégraphe et son acolyte Elsa Couvreur assument d’ailleurs pleinement avoir un "petit faible pour le kitch". Bien que Iona D’Annunzio préfère laisser une certaine liberté d’interprétation au public en privilégiant une création esthétique et divertissante, elle a une idée bien précise pour le fond de sa pièce.

Les joueur∙euse∙s, qui se croisent dans une cour de récréation, font face à divers obstacles qui demandent de faire un choix: abandonner ou continuer la partie, voire adapter les règles. La pièce présente des sujets complexes, mais de manière ludique. Au travers des inégalités, des stéréotypes, puis de l’empowerment, Stéréo-Genre se concentre sur l’impact des valeurs et des rôles sociaux. Si les stéréotypes et attributs de genre sont rapidement mis en avant, comme le groupe féminin qui danse comme des pom pom girls et le groupe masculin qui agit comme des commandos, les différents personnages s’échangent de groupe au fil de la pièce, comme pour casser les barrières du genre et ses injonctions. En plus de déconstruire ces éléments sociétaux, le but de ce spectacle est de proposer de nouvelles possibilités.

Bien que le collectif ne soit initialement pas basé sur le genre ou le féminisme, les co-fondatrices développent en commun des sujets de société et s’intéressent particulièrement aux normes. Si Iona D’Annunzio fait le lien entre la danse et ses études de sociologie en études genre, les deux femmes ont comme souhait "d’aborder les choses sans moraliser". Le but est que les individus puissent se reconnaître, plus particulièrement les enfants, puisque la chorégraphe veut que ses pièces soient accessibles pour les jeunes. "L'art est une super manière d'aborder des thématiques avec les jeunes sans que ce soit barbant, c’est plus ludique", explique-t-elle, et d’ajouter: "De passer les choses à travers le corps, je trouve que ça a une autre approche qui est, du coup, dans l’émotionnel et le corporel, au lieu d’être dans le verbal."

Un atelier famille est prévu avec les danseur∙euse∙s de la pièce, sous forme d’une boom. Les participant∙e∙s sont invité∙e∙s à venir habillé∙e∙s dans l'une des couleurs du spectacle, sans savoir à quel danseur ou danseuse elle correspond, dans le but de créer un lien durant la médiation. Voir les détails sur orientalvevey.ch

Woman’s Move est un collectif créé par Iona D’Annunzio et Elsa Couvreur en 2012, alors qu’elles s’étaient connues au Ballet Junior à Genève. Dans un esprit de loyauté et de bonne cohésion de groupe, les deux artistes travaillent régulièrement avec les mêmes interprètes au fil du temps. Elles soulignent l’avantage qu’elles ont d’être un duo, puisque leur but est de créer sans se mettre de pression, grâce à un système d’entraide.

Stéréo-Genre

Dès 6 ans
Les 11, 14 et 15 mai 2022 Théâtre de l’Oriental, Vevey

womansmove.com

Photo: Nicolas Senjaric

Le théâtre veveysan met l’accent sur les enfants et la famille avec comme entrée en matière, deux spectacles de danse.

Ce n’est pas la première fois que l’Oriental-Vevey rend le théâtre plus accessible à des publics peu habi- tués à s’y rendre. Cette fois-ci, dans l’idée de développer une vraie offre intergénérationnelle, les enfants et les familles sont mis à l’honneur ce mois. Avec comme ouverture du bal ce mercredi soir, la première du spectacle Le Milieu, à voir éga- lement les 7 et 8 mai. Puis avec Sté- réo-Genre, les 11, 14 et 20 mai. Pour un public dès 6 ans, ces deux spec- tacles de danse réflexifs aux scéno- graphies intrigantes et poétiques sont accessibles avec des tarifs ré- duits ou une carte culture pour les familles bénéficiant de CARITAS.

Médiatrice culturelle à l’Oriental-Vevey, Natacha Garcin, qui s’appuie sur un budget al- loué par la cohésion sociale, a à cœur de mettre en avant la danse jeune public. «La danse joue sur le sensoriel. C’est une ouverture sur des mondes qui forme l’esprit critique et le goût, à tout âge.» Un défi pour le théâtre vevey- san, qui petit à petit, tentera de convaincre ce nouvel auditoire. «Avec les enfants, on sent tout de suite s’ils aiment ou pas. C’est un public très porteur», sourit-elle.

Faciliter l’accès à la culture

Peut-on en conclure que la danse est davantage accessible pour les jeunes enfants que le théâtre? «Je ne pense pas forcément. Cela dé- pend de comment c’est fait. C’est vrai que, se passant de mots, la danse est peut-être plus facilement abordable de manière directe pour certains publics», explique la mé- diatrice culturelle. Adaptées aux jeunes spectateurs, ces deux pièces restent également attrayantes pour les parents. «L’idée, c’est de toucher l’âme d’enfant de chacun. Il faut que les adultes y trouvent une certaine poésie aussi.»

Pour inciter et faciliter l’accès à la culture de ces publics plus en marge, plusieurs activités ont été mises en place. Un bord de scène, une boum, ou encore cette garderie éphémère dès 2 ans (uniquement pour Stéréo-Genre). Pendant que les plus grands et les parents pro- fitent, les enfants en très bas âges sont encadrés par deux profession- nelles lors d’un atelier créatif.

Thématiques et sensibilisation

Si la création Le Milieu donne à voir un duo sensible, entre

une danseuse qui chante et un chanteur qui danse, dans Sté- réo-Genre, l’idée est la sensibili- sation. Chorégraphié par la Ge- nevoise Iona Dannunzio, de la Cie Woman’s Move, le spectacle mêle des danseurs de différents styles pour obtenir quelque chose de dynamique et de diversifié. «Nous essayons de mélanger et de réinventer les codes, notamment au travers de la danse contemporaine et de l’improvisation», précise-t- elle. Ces mouvements libérateurs qui permettent de faire passer des messages avec l’émotion et de questionner autrement qu’avec des mots puisent leurs source dans le terreau de base du projet: l’envie de confronter le jeune pu- blic aux questions de genre, tout

en restant dans le divertissement. «À cet âge-là, on parle davantage de questionner et d’amener à des réflexions qu’ils pourront connecter dans leur environnement quo- tidien», souligne la chorégraphe.

Pour cela, les interprètes partent d’un univers très coloré et de la thématique du jeu. Sur trois tableaux, un groupe de dan- seurs évolue sur des rythmiques électroniques. Le spectateur est alors invité à un cheminement: partir de la cour de récréation des enfants, pour arriver à celle des adultes. Création sensorielle et dynamique, Stéréo-Genre naît d’un choix d’une thématique précise, puis d’une recherche de mouve- ment tout autour. «Je m’inspire beaucoup des codes et imaginaires sociaux pour les ramener sur scène, à travers le mouvement», résume Iona Dannunzio.

❝

L’idée est de toucher l’âme d’enfant de chacun”

Natacha Garcin

Médiatrice culturelle

La compagnie Woman’s Move présente sa dernière création Stéréo-Genre à Genève puis à Vevey.

On avait rencontré Elsa Couvreur en 2015 lors de la création d’une de ses premières pièces, Even Raël Would Agree, sur  l’emprise au sein d’une communauté. Sa compagnie de danse Woman’s Move a  fait du chemin depuis. La danseuse et chorégraphe a joué un peu partout  son solo primé dans plusieurs festivals, Après le bip sonore/The Sensemaker, où elle enchaîne une gestuelle saccadée face à un répondeur téléphonique.

La dernière création de la compagnie est aujourd’hui à l’affiche de  L’Etincelle, à Genève, avant l’Oriental, à Vevey. Sous la forme d’un  triptyque, Stéréo-Genre entend aborder les inégalités, les  stéréotypes et l’empouvoirement par le mouvement. «Stéréo-Genre ne  cherche pas seulement à déconstruire les normes de genre en place, la  pièce esquisse de nouvelles possibilités, afin d’encourager dès le plus  jeune âge le développement d’un esprit à la fois critique et ouvert»,  lit-on en note d’intention.

La chorégraphie de Iona D’Annunzio, cofondatrice de la compagnie,  projette six danseuses et danseurs – Sophie Ammann, Elsa Couvreur,  Cédric Fadel Hattab, Margaux Monetti, Erin O’Reilly et Mathieu Parola –  dans un jeu à taille humaine.

Le festival Lancy en lumières proposera des animations et des spectacles gratuits jusqu’au 15 décembre.

Depuis  cette fin de semaine, le stade de Florimont, à Lancy (GE), a changé  d’ambiance. Aux cris des supporters de l’équipe locale de football se  sont ajoutés les rythmes binaires de spectacles de danses et les  lumières d’installations vidéo. La 4e édition du festival Lancy en lumières a investi les lieux jusqu’au 15 décembre. Au programme: du mapping, des  animations luminescentes et des shows. Le tout est gratuit.

L’objectif  de la Ville est d’amener l’art dans l’espace public, tout en offrant  aux spectateurs une nouvelle perspective des différents quartiers de la  commune. Le festival se déplace ainsi d’année en année sur le territoire  lancéen. La cuvée 2021 vise à «créer de l’émotion à travers le  mouvement, raison pour laquelle nous avons travaillé avec des compagnies  de danse», explique Mathilde Babel Rostan, responsable culturelle de la  Ville de Lancy. Par ailleurs, en cette période plutôt creuse en terme  d’animations extérieures, «c’est aussi une occasion pour les gens de se  retrouver. Ce n’est pas parce qu’il fait froid qu’on ne doit pas se  rencontrer.»

Interview par Gilles Soulhac.

« Après le bip sonore » au théâtre de la Parfumerie, du 23 au 28 novembre.

Créé en 2018 par Elsa Couvreur, chorégraphe et danseuse, vous avez  rendez-vous avec une duo entre une femme et un répondeur automatique.  Original et surtout tellement vécu par chacun d’entre nous.

Ce spectacle  a été représenté plus de 50 fois, dans 8 pays européens et 5 langues différentes.« Après le bip sonore » a remporté 4 prix au passage, ainsi que la reconnaissance du public et de la presse internationale.

C’est une première à Genève, et Elsa Couvreur nous a reçu pendant ses répétition.

Finfringe käynnistyi vahvasti Tiia Kasurisen vangitsevalla teoksella – kansainvälisissä vieraissa vanhoja tuttuja

Kansainvälisistä vieraista ensimmäisenä Åbo svenska teaterin (ÅST) päänäyttämön ottivat haltuunsa tanssija-koreografi Elsa Couvreur, joka esitti ensimmäisessä Finfringessä sooloteoksensa Sensemaker, ja näyttelijä-tanssija Mehdi Duman Sveitsistä. Kaksikon Anchor eli ankkuri käsittelee parisuhdetta fyysisen teatterin keinoin.

Esitys kysyy heti alkuun, mitä rakkaus on ja vastaa: abstrakti voima ja vapaa kuin taivaan lintu. Sitten alkaa Only You -kappaleen säestämänä abstaktin muuntaminen fyysiseksi kamppailuksi, jossa vapauden kanssa on vähän niin ja näin.

Couvreur ja Mehdi ovat treenanneet esityksensä timmiin kuntoon. Parisuhteen kiemurat, valtasuhteet, halut ja tarpeet, yksityisyyden ja yhteisyyden sekä rakkauden määrän rajat tulevat koetelluiksi ja läpikäydyiksi. Liikekieli ei polje ennalta arvattavia latuja, mutta ilmaisua ja sen välittämiä tunnetiloja on silti vaivaton seurata. Parin työskentely on saumatonta, joskin se jää välillä junnaamaan paikoilleen.

Hienompia kohtauksia sekä herkkyydessään että koomisuudessaan on se, kun kaksikko istuu selät vastakkain ja laulaa pätkiä tunnetuista rakkauslauluista, ensin kumpikin omiaan ja sitten yhteisen sävelen löytäen.

Kokonaisuus jättää minut silti kylmäksi, sillä en tavoita teoksessa mahdollisesti piileviä syvempiä kerroksia. Lopun tanssivat dinosaurukset alleviivaavat tarpeettomasti rakkauden alkukantaista viettiluonnetta.

Ельза Кувре, танцівниця й хореографиня вистави «Anchor»

Ельзо, вистава «Anchor» — це співпраця танцювальних компаній «Woman’s Move», яку ви співзаснували, та «Divisar», що її очолює Мехді Дюман. Ви обидва хореографи й танцівники шоу. Розкажіть, як познайомилися, чому створили спільний проєкт і взагалі — навколо яких цінностей об’єдналися керівники двох колективів?

Ми познайомилися під час майстеркласу швейцарського хореографа Табеа Мартіна і завдяки спільним імпровізаційним вправам наодинці зрозуміли, що нам було дуже весело разом, і ми отримали насолоду від колективної роботи. Тоді Табеа запропонував нам зробити спільне шоу, ми погодилися використовувати теми кохання та романтичних стосунків, бо вважали, що це відповідає тій «хімії», яка відбулася між нами під час роботи.

Театральні критики зізнавалися, що після перегляду «Anchor» кілька годин усміхалися. Шоу називали «зворушливим поглядом на кохання» і зауважували «вісцеральний підхід» до пошуку відповіді на питання «що таке любов?» Тож ми хочемо дізнатися, який аспект теми «кохання» ви з Мехді Дюманом обрали для постановки?

Ми хотіли зобразити «дисфункціональну щасливу історію кохання» в тому сенсі, що в нас була ідея показати не лише хороші періоди життя подружжя, але й конфлікти, суперечки, непорозуміння, що є частиною будь-яких романтичних стосунків. Однак ми хотіли виявити цей негатив із гумором, ніжністю та співчуттям, що, мабуть, і робить «Anchor» настільки зворушливим і веселим. Ми застосовували наш спільний досвід (у Мехді великий досвід у театрі, а в мене у хореографії) для створення своєрідного вісцерального шоу, розмовляючи з усіма органами глядачів так само, як і з їхнім мозком.

Як і чому вистава трансформувалася від прем’єри 2018 року до сьогодні?

Ми любимо дивувати одне одного під час вистави, іноді навіть жартуємо, творимо щось несподіване, чого ніколи раніше не обговорювали. Це робить виставу живою, і наша «хімія» працює. Іноді ми вирішуємо додати ці сюрпризи до вистави та вплести їх у дію. Тож у період з 2018 року й дотепер ми доповнили «Anchor» багатьма деталями і, ймовірно, продовжуватимемо це робити, поки спільно працюватимемо на сцені. Це живий театр танцю.

Чому виникла потреба розширити початкову 20-хвилинну версію до 50 хвилин? Чим доповнилася ваша танцювальна «розмова» про кохання?

Це сталося майже випадково. Під час Единбурзького фестивалю 2018 року (Edinburgh Festival Fringe — Yabl) я випадково забронювала два слоти для виступу замість одного, тож одразу подзвонила Мехді, щоб запитати його: «Пам'ятаєш, ця вистава, яку ми зробили, що триває 20 хвилин? Чи не хотів би ти продовжити її до 50 хв та поїхати до Единбурга на три місяці раніше?» Він погодився, і ми повернулися до роботи. Тепер віддаємо перевагу довшій версії, оскільки можемо розповісти в ній об’ємнішу історію. Загалом це відбулося з професійних та практичних міркувань, і ми дуже щасливі, що так сталося.

Ельзо, ви танцюватимете в Україні втретє. Перформанс «The Sensemaker» був головною подією GogolFest у Вінниці (2019), а навесні 2021-го ви повторно привозили шоу на GogolFest до Маріуполя. Що вам запам’яталося під час минулих виступів в Україні та чи відбувся енергетичний обмін із українськими глядачами на фестивалі?

Мене вразили ентузіазм та відкритість глядачів. Я відчувала, що вони дійсно перебувають зі мною, поки я виступала. Також мені дуже поталанило ділитися своїми роботами та здійснювати певний обмін між різними культурами. Окрім того, «The Sensemaker» можна трактувати по-різному і навіть порушувати різні політичні питання. Було дуже цікаво поговорити з деякими глядачами після вистави та послухати їхні враження. У мене не було часу або можливості поспілкуватися з такою кількістю людей, з якою мені б хотілося — зокрема через мовний бар'єр — але було дуже приємно почути деяких із них. Я дуже вдячна GogolFest за те, що він надав мені таку можливість.

Ми пам’ятаємо, що два роки тому спеціально для показу на ГОГОЛЬFEST ви з перекладачем створили текст «The Sensemaker» українською. Це зруйнувало мовні бар’єри, щоб глядачі сприйняли історію максимально органічно. Чи адаптуєте ви цього разу «Anchor», можливо, якимось несподіваним чином?

«Anchor» переважно невербальний, що робить його доступним для всіх глядачів. У саундтреку є частина, де ви можете почути, як ми розмовляємо французькою та англійською мовами, але ми хотіли використовувати це наче музику, так, щоб люди не розуміли всього, що ми кажемо. Тон наших голосів важливіший. У ньому ви навіть можете розпізнати мелодію першої зустрічі.

Ви залучатимете глядачів у Дніпрі до сценічної «розмови» про кохання? Адже в рецензіях оглядачі пишуть про веселу інтерактивну складову «Anchor».

Через ситуацію з COVID-19 нам, на жаль, довелося змінити інтерактивні частини вистави. Раніше ми залучали кількох людей на сцену і ненадовго змушували їх брати участь із нами, але були змушені змінити це. Тому версія 2021 року менш інтерактивна, ніж 2018-го, та, сподіваємося, ми все-таки зможемо передати ті самі емоції глядачам.

Що зазвичай захоплює глядачів «Anchor» найсильніше? З огляду на географію показів, історій чимало.

Глядачі завжди думають, що ми пара, і нам це подобається, оскільки означає, що ми можемо передати на сцені ті емоції, які хочемо. Окрім того, сорочка Мехді наприкінці стає мокрою від поту, і аудиторію це дуже вражає. Я думаю, це показує, наскільки наш дует віддається фізично, що досить виснажливо. Також сподіваємося, що глядачів проймає історія кохання, яку ми передаємо.

Low Down

Directed by Woman’s Move at the Rialto. Till June 15th though touring. Contact Rialto and producers for details.

Review

It’s back. After its triumphal multiple award-winning progress in  2019 (not least the highest praise from Nicholas Collett of FringeReview  at the Edinburgh Fringe) Swiss collective Woman’s Move return to the  Rialto with The Sensemaker. It’s been performed over fifty  times in several different languages, and different languages too is  what we get here, confined to menus.

It’s everything in nothingness, a show slicing glitch-capitalism and  totalitarianism with sexploitation; stripping people bare enough to be  objects and automatons at once. And all those phone-queuings you’ve ever  or will ever make.

There’s an old-fashioned telephone, a chair, a young woman, actor  Elsa Couvreur. She’s ordered to stand uncomfortably in the centre of the  room. If she strays for comfort she’s ordered back again. At first  she’s waiting in a queuing system with different languages options –  then there’s a kind of set: of songs Couvreur mimes perfectly, to the  Beethoven Ode to Joy, Handel’s Messiah Allelujah, a set of variations on harpsichord also by Handel, and Swiss pop I can’t identify.

Then in English (each country will hear it in their own language)  Couvreur’s told to obey increasingly bizarre functions, turning on  quarters, getting down on all fours, stooping, gyrating – at one point  it’s suggested the young woman is auditioning for sex or adult  films. The most intrusive questions get asked. But it’s more universal.  Finally she’s commanded to perform absurd gestures; each accompanied by a  jolted ‘please-thankyou’ as if compliance isn’t in question.

There’s resets as the disembodied voice jumps back and the  applicant’s out of the loop. The recorded voice is cleverly calibrated  so you know the same digital word ‘four’ is being repeated robotically.  This is punishing people for computerised mistakes, pre-echoing a  digital dystopic world of commands that glitch out yet allow no recall.

To vary this too there’s moments of freedom. A glitch throws multiple  commands Couvreur has no time to follow sequentially, but when the  famous Pointer Sisters ‘I’m so excited’ arrives with its ‘I’m losing  control and I think I like it’ in fact Couvreur performs all these to  the music in rapid sequence, a comi-tragic moment of bizarre freedom  repeating multiple moves lending a spurt of exhilaration. There’s a  profound paradox, musical disinhibition and deep conditioning. And  there’s a sense of people being ordered to dance on film in black and  white. We’ve seen them. Woman’s Move know we have. Then there’s a  blackout, as if somehow the character’s having too much fun.

Nudity’s heralded so there’s no spoiler in exploring what it means  when Couvreur’s ordered to strip. What the character manages to do here  beyond the robotic narrative she’s forced into, is slide out of  obedience into brief vulnerable selfhood: stripping partly, ordered to  fully, covering herself, ordered to stand in merciless exposure. And  repeat earlier moves.

In itself it’s a purgatory of waiting or hell, a groundhogging rewind  as the fulfilment of meaningless repetitive work-tasks; themselves  figured as a dry-run for eternity. Who needs more torments? And what  does exiting the way Couvreur does signify?

The most uncomfortable moment though is when Couvreur is allowed to  put her clothes back on. Again that sliding moment of vulnerability, the  private self no public should see: the way we adjust underwear to our  naked bodies. It doesn’t say ‘look at me’ but ‘look at you’.

Couvreur’s performance is phenomenal in itself: both physically  balletic (she looks to be a trained ballet dancer) and mine-perfect,  with miniscule expressions occasionally allowed to flitter across her  face, like a revelation of a god in the machine. Her eyes, ever alert  for trouble, crinkle just once with humour, often with puzzlement,  always on guard.

How row back from this, this mix of phone-queue for purchase  repurposed as exploitative job application and techno-serfdom – or even  techno-murder? Is Couvreur’s character traumatised, anonymised and  robotically obedient, even liminally subversive? There’s a gesture  suggesting residual life. But the metaphor holds: terminally  exploitative practices, totalitarianism, being lined up naked with all  its attendant horrors.

But it’s these forces appearing in their hideous nakedness that also  raises this show to the highest level. There’s nominally a difference  between the naked and the nude, but here it’s probed, questioned and  collapsed. The question really should be, what’s really appeared naked  to us? Not Couvreur perhaps. An astonishing, disturbing shapeshifting  sliver of genius.

The Rialto Theatre (by the clock tower) continues to carve out its  well deserved reputation for taut, edgy theatre. It’s now back in action  following the Covid pandemic and curating drama at the top of the  range. ‘The Sensemaker’ starts quietly enough with a woman waiting by  the phone and choosing Option 1 for this and Option 2 for that. There is  that familiar hanging on the line with only repetitive muzak to fill  the void.

From this point on, the increasing menace of the options –  interspersed by the waiting, waiting, waiting – presents a steady turn  of the vice. If you don’t want this option, say ‘yes’, but if you do  want that option say ‘no’. And what could be more outrageously ironic  than having Beethoven’s ‘Ode To Joy’ as the backing track to these  robotic messages?

This one-woman one-act show, performed by Elsa Couvreur, depicted  this dystopian world against a bare black stage. Each successive option  from the robotic telephone commander demanded more than the last. It was  a battle for dignity and against digital totalitarianism in whatever  language you choose to speak.

Elsa first trained as a dancer and now works as a choreographer and  director for the Swiss company Woman’s Move. She explained that in ‘The  Sensemaker’ she was keen to “explore the effects of new technologies on  our lives… and the laborious administrative procedures of our  bureaucratic systems.”

Elsa Couvreur is not afraid of silence or stillness on stage. But she  also reveals her character’s emotional state by devices as dramatic as  the balletic arc of her body or as subtle as the twitch of an eye. We  trust the messaging.

Our heroine must wait and mime as she is gradually stripped of all  humanity. Step by step the humiliations build until there are no more  options and nothing is left on the bare stage.

Obsessive acting! Compulsive theatre!

★★★★ A remarkable piece of absurdist exposition in movement, mime and word

Beethoven’s Ode to Joy is anything but that when played ad nauseam on a loop while you are  kept on hold by a robotic voice saying, “All our operators are currently  busy. Please wait”.

The immediate appeal of The Sensemaker is that it taps into an immediately identifiable experience that  everyone has had. Reassurances that my ‘request is being processed’ are  of little comfort. “Where? When? By whom and for how long?” I cry. These  are all questions that must be going through the mind of choreographer  Elsa Couvreur as she moves and dances her way through the dehumanising  wait.

Her  situation does not improve. The voice on the end of the line makes  increasingly personal and intimate requests of her that she must fulfil  if she wants to advance further up the queue. Trapped in the system of  clapping her hands in answer to tick-box questions she succumbs to  jumping through ever more demanding hoops; trapped in the system;  programmed to do as the voice suggests. The choice is to give in, accept  that bureaucracy has the upper hand and comply or lose at the very  least you place in the line and at worst find your request declined  altogether.

Her  frustrations, compliance and ultimate submission are demonstrated in  tightly choreographed sequences that make use of interpretive gestures  and repeated motifs in line with the broadcast messages. She becomes as  robotic as the voice she hears, controlled by external powers, while  retaining elegant lines of movement and at times comedic step patterns.  It’s a remarkable piece of absurdist exposition in movement, mime and  word.

The Sensemaker comes courtesy of Woman’s Move at the Rialto Theatre as part of the  Brighton Fringe and is a tribute to the breadth of programming to be  found there. It’s won awards at Fringes in Edinburgh, Gothenburg and  Stockholm and is no doubt well-placed for further recognition as an  outstanding piece of performance art.

Interview of Elsa Couvreur during the Air GogolFest in Vinnytsia (by TV channel UA Vinnytsia)

Вчора, 20 жовтня, у Вінниці в рамках “Air ГогольFest” відбулась прем’єра швейцарської вистави “The Sensemaker”. Постановка, яку організатори заявляли як хедлайнера театральної сцени, зібрала повну залу та зірвала бурхливі овації. 

Надвечір другого дня цьогорічного  “Air ГогольFest” у Вінниці мала відбутись українська прем’єра швейцарської вистави “The Sensemaker”, яка вже встигла зібрати декілька престижних нагород та отримала схвальні відгуки критиків. Зала великої театральної сцени почала швидко заповнюватись глядачами і навіть ті, хто довго блукав коридорами “Кристалу” в пошуках саме тієї зали, зрештою потрапляли куди треба. 

Перед початком вистави організатори надали слово послу Швейцарії в Україні Клоду Вільду, який одразу вибачився за те, що не знає української мови. Це він промовив ламаною російською і одразу ж перейшов на англійську. Пан посол подякував організаторам фестивалю і наголосив на необхідності таких подій та міжнародного культурного співробітництва. 

Дзвінок… дзвінок… дзвінок…

В залі вимикають світло і западає тиша. Перешіптування глядачів уривається різким телефонним дзвінком. Він дзвонить раз. Два. На сцені з’являється жінка, вона одягнена в синю блузку і темну спідницю. В руках тримає сумку. 

– Всі наші оператори зайняті, – промовляє механічний голос автовідповідача. Вмикається монофонічна версія Симфонії № 9 Бетховена. В даному випадку це той вид музики, який мало кому подобається, адже означає очікування. 

Одразу ж варто наголосити, що “The Sensemaker” це моновистава, тобто вистава одного актора або ж, у даному випадку, однієї акторки – Ельзи Куверр. З декорацій тут знадобився лише стілець і старий стаціонарний телефон.

Жінка сідає на стілець, ставить сумку на коліна і готується довго чекати. Весь її вигляд демонструє, що їй не зручно, вона розгублена. Механічний голос (який насправді є записом з Гугл-перекладача) каже жінці стати в центрі кімнати. Та замість прямого зв’язку з оператором стається збій і жінка на кілька хвилин стає провідником чи то пак, приймачем, який ловить уривки промовлених кимось в телефонних розмовах фраз. 

Весь цей калейдоскоп фраз відтворює акторка. Сама вона не промовляє жодного слова, але це зрозуміло лише завдяки гучності й тому, що фрази лунають як жіночим, так і чоловічим голосом. З багатомовного багатоголосся можна виокремити, як якийсь шотландець зневажливо називає англійців словом “wankers”. Решта фраз залишаються загадками, адже звучать французькою, німецькою та іншими мовами і, навіть, мовою жестів. 

“Чи повідомите Ви нам розмір Вашої нижньої білизни для рекламних цілей?”

Коли знову налаштовується зв’язок з механічним голосом і “всі оператори” виявляються знову зайнятими, багато глядачів одразу впізнають себе. Поки жінка на сцені злегка підтанцьовує під Бетховена, в голові зринають спогади про спроби добитись чогось від свого мобільного оператора. Всі ті рази, коли доводилось чекати незліченну кількість часу, поки на лінії з’явиться жива людина. 

Але героїні вистави доводиться мати справу з механічним голосом. Він, нарешті, повідомляє, що для обробки запиту доведеться відповісти на декілька запитань. І тут знову виникає аналогія зі “спілкуванням” з автовідповідачем мобільного оператора (чи будь-яким іншим), адже жінці пропонують обрати мову спілкування та відповідати на запитання, плескаючи в долоні (альтернатива натисканню кнопок) певну кількість разів. 

Глядачі не знають, який саме запит намагається подати жінка. Та це, власне, й не так важливо, адже серія запитань від механічного голосу, в будь-якому випадку, видається абсурдною. 

“Чи маєте Ви хворобу, яка може спровокувати смерть?”

“Чи подорожували Ви країнами, де люди мають хвороби, які можуть спровокувати смерть?”

“Ви раніше брали участь у порнографічному фільмі чи будь-якому іншому матеріалі, призначеному для сексуального збудження дорослих?”

“Чи брали Ви коли-небудь участь в  терористичних актах?”

“Ви ще не брали участі в нетерористичному акті досі?

Позитивні відповіді на запитання “Чи є у вас будь-які навички/ терпіння/ наполегливість/ мотивація/ енергія?” спричиняють подальний розвиток подій, адже механічний голос одразу наказує:

– Тепер покажіть нам повний Ваших навичок, мотивації та енергії, будь ласка, дякую. 

“Зараз ми передаємо Ваш запит у відповідне управління. Будь ласка, зачекайте, дякуємо.”

Кожна наступна дія у виставі стає все більш абсурдною. Вимоги механічного голосу все зростають і зростають. При цьому він обіцяє, що “запит обробляється” і що “запит передають у відповідне управління”, але фактично жодного прогресу не помітно. Характерно, що жінка продовжує виконувати команди механічного голосу і навіть не думає зупинятись. Коли їй вже вкотре пропонують обрати мову спілкування, в неї вривається терпець і вона намагається одразу плеснути в долоні шість разів (для вибору української). Але система сприймає це по-своєму і обирає якусь іншу мову. Жінка швидко розкаюється і продовжує слухняно виконувати всі команди. 

– Доброго дня. Ласкаво просимо номер 3654782. Для того, щоб виконати Ваш запит, ми зараз проведемо кілька фізичних оглядів. Будь ласка, залишайтесь в центрі кімнати, – каже голос. 

Далі йде ціла серія команд на зразок “зробіть чверть повороту праворуч” або “поставте руки на п’яти і дивіться прямо вперед і не посміхайтеся”. Жінка дивується, злиться, губиться, але все виконує. 

Голос на цьому не зупиняється. 

– … зробіть хвилю своїм тілом три рази, потім відскакуйте назад чотири рази, потім вперед три рази, потім рухайтесь так, наче б’єтесь головою об стіну…, потім погладьте свій торс, потім щось стисніть, потім рухайте пальцями, потім покажіть художню інтерпретацію хвилі…, потім лижіть підлогу два рази…, – лунає довжелезна серія команд, яку аж ніяк неможливо запам’ятати.

Жінка виконує абсолютно всі рухи під енергійну музику і виходить щось на зразок танцю.

Всесильний автовідповідач 

Зрештою, голос доводить її фактично до межі, кажучи, що для виконання запиту доведеться роздягнутись. Вона з усіх сил намагається цього уникнути, але варіантів їй залишають тільки два: або припинити дзвінок, або зняти одяг. Вона обирає друге і стоїть в центрі кімнати в самій лише нижній білизні засоромлена й перелякана.

А бездушний механічний голос все не зупиняється і знову змушує виконати цілу серію безглуздих рухів, які, ніби-то, необхідні для виконання запиту. 

І це все? 

Жінці дозволяють одягнутись і кажуть стати по центру кімнати. Виникає відчуття, що автовідповідач має необмежену владу над героїнею. І це відчуття підтверджується, коли вона намагається взутись, але лунає телефонний дзвінок. Вона біжить до телефону в одному черевику, але не встигає взяти слухавку. Хоче повернутись до стільця, але знову дзвінок. Варто жінці підійти до телефону, як дзвінок вривається.

Їй таки вдається перехитрувати машину і вчасно вхопити трубку, але на лінії стається збій. 

– Головне меню. Щоб відповісти “так”, плескайте один. Час у Ваших руках. Щоб відповісти “ні”, плескайте два. Час у Ваших руках. Будь ласка, щоб підтвердити свій запит, дайте відповіді на наступні запитання, будь ласка, дякуємо, – промовляє голос, коли знову з’являється зв’язок. 

–  Я не робот, – промовляє голос. 

Один сплеск. 

– Добре. Я приймаю всі файли cookie. 

Один сплеск. 

– Добре. Я приймаю всі умови. 

Один сплеск. 

– Добре. Я приймаю політику конфіденційності. 

Один сплеск. 

– Добре. Я хочу підписатися на щоденну інформаційну розсилку і скористатися вигідними пропозиціями. 

Один сплеск. 

– Добре. Дякую. Ми Вам зателефонуємо. До побачення. 

Поки жінка намагається зрозуміти, що щойно сталось знову лунає телефонний дзвінок. 

– Доброго дня. Дякуємо за Ваш інтерес, ми отримали велику кількість заявок, – лунає механічний голос. – Наше рішення – це зовсім не відображення якості Вашої роботи. Ваше листування нас дійсно заохочує та відзначає і ми сподіваємось на подальшу співпрацю, тому ваш запит № 059844444318712 було схвалено. Вітаємо. До побачення. 

Знову лунає Дев’ята симфонія Бетховена, а жінка стоїть з виглядом, який так і промовляє “І це все?”. 

Замість висновків

Цю виставу закордонні оглядачі називають “Чорним дзеркалом” (серіал – авт.) на сцені, “мрією і жахіттям”, “ідеальною метафорою нашого світу” та відзначають чудесну акторську гру Ельзи Куверр. 

“The Sensemaker” зірвав бурхливі овації від глядачів. Всі аплодували стоячи впродовж декількох хвилин. Після чого розійшлись по наступних подіях фестивалю, роблячи (або ж не роблячи) свої власні висновки про побачене.

« Après le bip sonore », interprété et mis en scène par Elsa Couvreur, figure parmi les temps forts de la nouvelle saison du Théâtre du Pommier. (photo sp)

Les femmes sont à l’honneur dans la nouvelle saison du Centre culturel neuchâtelois — Théâtre du Pommier. Elsa Couvreur, Michal Svironi, Ledwina Costantini, Nathalie Sandoz : elles portent chacune un regard singulier sur le monde qui les entoure. Plein feux sur la première partie du pro- gramme qui s’étend du 4 septembre au 1er décembre. 

« Au théâtre du Pommier, nous sommes pour l’égalité, et pas seulement depuis les manifestations du 14 juin dernier », relève Roberto Betti, directeur du Centre culturel neuchâtelois – Théâtre du Pommier. La nouvelle saison fait la part belle aux projets féminins, sans oublier les hommes pour autant. « A travers différentes pièces, des femmes nous dévoilent le regard qu’elles portent sur le monde, les relations, le fait de donner la vie et de l’accompagner, leur corps, le pouvoir », détaille Roberto Betti. Des femmes de talent ...
La saison s’ouvrira mercredi 4 septembre avec « Crash test », une création mettant en scène deux femmes-clowns qui rêvent de danser dans une comé-
die musicale à Broadway. « Marylène Rouiller et Christelle Carmillet osent tout, quoiqu’en pensent les gens. Ce culot-là me touche », confie Roberto Betti. La performeuse genevoise Elsa Couvreur, elle, s’intéresse à l’entretien d’embauche comme intrusion mentale. « Durant cette délicate rencontre menée par téléphone, la candidate sera poussée à l’extrême sous l’emprise de ce bip
sonore », précise le directeur du théâtre. Dans le cadre de Chocolatissimo, l’artiste israélienne Michal Svironi partage le chocolat dans ce qu’il peut inspirer : amer, doux et sucré. Quant à la Tessinoise Ledwina Costantini, elle a mené un solide travail de recherche sur la place des femmes dans l’œuvre de
Shakespeare, en relation avec le pouvoir. Durant son spectacle qui fait écho à l’actualité, elle invitera le public à prendre position sur un échiquier.
... mais aussi des hommes
Egalité oblige, le Théâtre du Pommier accueillera également sur ses planches plusieurs artistes masculins, à commencer par l’humoriste Jessie Kobel, qui dévoilera son nouveau spectacle. Philippe Cohen, lui, livre une pièce touchante sur les relations humaines en se demandant à quoi aurait ressemblé sa vie si sa mère avait rencontré Churchill. A travers ses mimes et ses mouvements, Yves Marc décrypte le langage du corps dans un spectacle-conférence.
Des petits chouchoutés
Au Théâtre du Pommier, on choie les plus jeunes avec une saison entièrement concoctée à leur intention. Parmi les spectacles au programme, « Souliers rouges » d’Aurélie Namur qui aborde l’épineuse relation entre une fille et sa belle-mère. Pour les tout-petits, dès 4 ans, « Promenade nocturne » s’intéresse au coucher des enfants, en particulier à la peur du noir. Tout au long du spectacle, les bambins sont invités à dialoguer avec « le noir », afin de vaincre leurs peurs nocturnes. A noter encore que l’école de théâtre du Pommier pour adultes dès 16 ans s’est également enrichie de nouveaux modules de chant et de mise en jeu contemporaine avec la chanteuse d’opéra Irina Solomatina, respectivement la comédienne neuchâteloise Emilie Blaser. (ak)

★★★★

At a time when the UK is experimenting with mass facial recognition technologies in the name of counter-terrorism, The Sensemaker is a poignant theatrical event. With anxieties around London becoming the capital of a potential surveillance state, along with fierce debates surrounding the violation of human rights, Elsa Couvreur’s concept is a clever one indeed. 

Her character is not named, rather, she is numbered: 3654782. A one-woman show, The Sensemaker makes use of a disembodied robotic voice to help guide the narrative. It is an Orwellian dystopia. A warren where AI has ceased to exist as the brain-child of the human race, becoming parental figures instead. Perhaps ‘parent’ is too soft a word, though. The automated tone that blares from above feel dictatorial. Every sentence ends with “Please, Thank you,” a chilling attempt to simulate courtesy, while its demands grow steadily more humiliating.

The Sensemaker also toys with the increasing presence that tech plays in one’s daily life, flavours of Facebook and Cambridge Analytica Scandal oozing into being through a gathering of Couvreur’s physical and emotional data. Told mostly through a canny use of choreography and lip-synching, there are inventive changes of pace and highly unique flashes of content. 

Forced into submission by an infernal dial tone and tracks of elevator music, Couvreur is consistently made to hold the line. Promises that her query is being registered and then redirected to the relevant department come with endless hoops to jump through. The hellfire builds inside of her, slowly. Its flames kindled by frustration. A sinister technical difficulty calls not only the limits of the human consciousness into  question, but the disadvantages of AI too. That Couvreur is responsible for every creative facet of the production is awe-inspiring.

The inclusion of nudity doesn’t feel gratuitous either. It is wholly necessary in its depiction of shame, as well as its analysis of the over-sexualisation of the female body. Couvreur’s discomfort is our discomfort. Her anger is our anger. Like her sheer tights that ladder upon redressing, The Sensemaker is delicate. But, above all, it is daring and witty to boot.

OUTSTANDING SHOW

Low Down

A highly entertaining and provocative solo show that addresses our relationship with technology – and each other – in modern society. A barometer for our times.

Review

I have been fortunate enough to see theatre of all styles and languages, in many different countries, but “The Sensemaker” is one of the deftest and most provocative pieces I’ve experienced in a while. Essentially this is a solo performance that addresses our relationship with technology – and increasingly its direct involvement in our lives – whether we like it or not. However, it has much wider resonances, both political and moral. As such it is a barometer for our times.

A bare stage, bar a table with an old fashioned dial telephone – and a chair – are all that performer/maker Elsa Couvreur has for company. We are in an isolated environment where a disembodied mechanical voice issues instructions in response to our protagonist’s unknown request. She has to perform increasingly bizarre tasks to have her wish fulfilled (whatever that is), by turns fragile and courageous, constantly waiting on hold (to “Ode To Joy” played on what seems like a Casio keyboard) for the next command.

Our performer is slight and slender, with bright eyes that are simultaneously curious and alert. They constantly search for the next cue – whether physical or vocal – and are puzzled when the answer is denied or obscure. However the audience is always aware that the performer has a degree of optimism and an acute awareness of her physicality.

The performance centres on brilliant and precise choreography, linked to the sparse text, which incidentally is in several languages. This is a piece that transcends the need for translation. The audience need to merely observe to understand that this is our future – and our past – being played out.

A staccato series of commands sees the woman fulfilling complex choreography commands only to be thwarted by what seems to be a power cut. The lights go out and the sound is silenced. In the darkness we hear her cry for help, only for the power to be restored, with her desperately trying to catch up with the beat. To our relief she does so, but this heartbreaking journey continues, with our  accompanying assumption of guilt and responsibility .

To describe or reference more would do a disservice to the performance. Rest assured that this piece strips away all artifice, all dishonesty and presents the audience with a stark moral choice.

This wonderful piece, for me, references many things –  the indifference of the Holocaust, the intolerance of modern society and ultimately the doom that we face if we don’t start communicating. It is deep and trenchant, but also wonderfully entertaining. It left me feeling  deeply affected and pondering everything that I had seen and heard. I hope and trust that ultimately it will leave you feeling as optimistic as I do about the power of art as a force for change.

Published August 26, 2019 by Nicholas Collett

★★★★

“Hello, all of our operators are currently busy, please wait” And as a jangly version of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy puts the caller on hold, that’s what Elsa Couvreur does. She passes the intervening time by lip-synching to the automated messages, adding in hand and arm gestures like some kind of impromptu semaphore.

Waiting, however, turns into something that’s insidiously Kafka-esque: when the disembodied voice starts giving Couvreur various tasks, she complies – even when the instructions veer away from clapping in response to questions and into more prurient, humiliating commands.

What started out as a whimsical, funny solo about interacting with faceless technologies morphs into a darkly troubling vision of a computerised bureaucracy where we are just numbers being crunched in the machines.

★★★

Battling with an automated voice on the phone, and nothing much else. That’s the set up and premise of The Sensemaker, and it’s a very impressive feat to hold an audience for an hour with the only real dialogue coming from a pre-recorded voice. But Elsa Couvreur gives everything to her performance in order to do so, and it’s enjoyable to watch.

Playing a character with no name (that we know of), she carries out ridiculous task after ridiculous task to get an answer to an unknown question, and the piece really does wait until the last second to give you any idea what it’s all for. Undoubtedly a stylistic choice, for me it didn’t quite have the impact intended. It just took too long to get there. Every attempt at humour, while indeed funny, was reliant on building to that moment with repeated motifs and as a viewer that posed problems. The structure of the piece became quite predictable, I found myself losing interest at times because I knew where the gag would come in. While dragging out the story worked for the first joke, it soon became tiresome.

However the piece redeemed itself when it took on a darker tone. Suddenly what had been funny before was now intrusive, wrong and distressing to watch. I could almost physically feel the violation experienced by the character, and Couvreur did a fantastic job of portraying that. It’s a shame this part only took up a small fraction of the piece right at the end – this was to me what was interesting and has potential to be expanded upon. The moments I remember most from the piece, other than an incredible explosion of a weird and wonderful dance, were all contained to the last 15 minutes or so. Still, the whole piece did make for an intriguing comment on technology within our society.

By the end of the play, I left feeling as though I had definitely seen one of the more interesting and unique pieces at the fringe. I just wish there had been more content within it.

★★★★

The set is bare. A chair, a rotary dial telephone on a desk. That’s it. It’s a waiting room of sorts. In walks the smartly dressed Elsa Couvreur. Although it’s never explicitly stated, we sense she’s arrived for a job interview. After she settles in, the phone rings. “Hello, all of our operators are currently busy, please wait,” says one of those incredibly annoying automated voices, followed by an even more annoying synthesised version of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.”

Couvreur experiences quite a bit over the next hour of The Sensemaker but joy is not among. As she waits awkwardly, the computerised voice gives her a set of instructions. As she blindly but uncertainly follows, the tension increases as she gets increasingly frustrated. But this is a job interview. And it’s a job she wants, so despite everything she does as she is asked.

There are amusing moments as she finally starts to make headway through the automated messages, only for several steps backwards to be made later. Through it all, Couvreur utters not a single word. Her facial expressions say it all.

The amusing becomes increasingly uncomfortable, disturbing even. When the voice tells her to strip off and turn around, she pauses but complies. Her obedience is unsettling. Just how far would she go? Would we be just as compliant, as subservient, as unquestioning? How far would we go? Indeed, just how much do people think but then remain silent and blindly follow.

I’m not sure how you categorise the well-paced The Sensemaker but it is a remarkable solo performance. Couvreur’s presence holds the attention well. When she looks at the audience you feel she is looking at you, ‘speaking’ personally. It also certainly makes you think.

★★★

Have you ever been on hold? The irritating music. The repetitive recorded voice. The infuriation. But when we reach the end and someone answers, aren’t we polite.

The Sensemaker is a predominantly multimedia, choreographed piece, responding to sound and music, with repetitive, but also different gestures and movement throughout.

We are there to question what is happening, and what would we do for the right opportunity. Some parts of the performance are comical – the performer continues to smile but her eyes and her glances away insist she is nothing but happy – a relatable response to being on hold; and others are unfathomable. Would you really do THAT if you were asked? If your opportunity depended on it?

While the piece is simple, there is a sense of Sci-Fi to it. The recorded voice and the reactions are relatable to anyone who has been stuck on hold. But the responses that are required e.g. ‘Clap 6 times for English.’ ‘Crouch down and take one step to the right …(for analyses)…’. e.t.c is demanding and unusual, making this process the performer goes through feel all too much like a potential future reality.

It feels funny but it also feels dark and unnerving – reaching some points when you really question what she is working for and whether it is worth it. But who are we to question when we may be in the same predicament and willingly do the same things.

With almost 99% pure movement with sound and music queues, The Sensemaker is a really interesting piece; being able to bring something so deep across with only the minimal is quite a feat and a very clever response.

The Sensemaker is good fun, but also dark. It throws up a lot of questions about ourselves, our World and the Future. And watching something very ‘mime’ orientated was a breath of fresh air through the Fringe.

★★★

A woman battles with an answering machine, taking on technology and bureaucracy by completing myriad ridiculous tasks in an entertaining show that walked a line between funny and disturbing. Despite its promise, however, I felt there were problems with the pacing of the performance, which makes sense when taking into account the fact that this has previously been presented as a thirty minute show: I couldn’t help but feel that the shorter length would suit the piece more than its current hour long runtime. It took far too long to get from beat to beat, making the show drag, and my interest was frequently lost. However, the way the solo performer engaged in dialogue with a recorded voice made this very chilling, with the humour at the start was a brilliant juxtaposition to the more horrifying elements at the end.

★★★★ Excellent

Human and machine collide in this surrealistic one-hander devised and performed by Elsa Couvreur. A dystopic portrayal of the arbitrary nature of bureaucracy and our blind trust in automated devices.'Dressed in smart office attire, a woman walks onto the stage. In one corner is an empty chair, a rotary dial phone in the opposite corner. She settles in, as if she is waiting to be called for an interview. The automated message of an answering machine reassures her, “Hello, all of our operators are currently busy, please wait”, followed by a nagging computerised version of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”.

Using the hollow and overpolite jargon of customer service, the voice invites the woman to follow a set of instructions. Blindly, she starts fulfilling the requests, whilst we begin to wonder just how far she’s willing to go. Tension builds when we realise that the tasks are increasingly humiliating, pedantic. The woman’s blind obedience is unsettling. In the most sinister feat, her body becomes an object, entirely subservient to the computer. Driven by a helpless urge to please, she satisfies its every demand, oblivious to those who might be behind the machine. This resounds as a metaphor of modern cyber-communication. Private pictures are often taken naively, then sent out to please someone, with disregard for the boundless connectivity and sharing potential of our devices. Before we know it, they can be all over the web.

The only issue with this performance could be its length.  At last year’s Fringe it was one half of a double bill, a mere thirty minutes. Doubling its running time incurs a serious risk of becoming repetitive. The looped messages, which are at first amusing, then more disturbing, are just numbing as the time elapses, their sense of purpose growing weaker.

The Sensemaker is a dystopic portrayal of the arbitrary nature of bureaucracy, a sobering criticism of our blind trust in automated devices. Elsa Couvreur is an insightful artist, who demonstrates utmost dedication to her work.

After Edinburgh, this show will be travelling to a number of international Fringe festivals, including Sweden, Finland, Switzerland, Turkey and Italy.'

★★★★★ Fringe Biscuit for The Sensemaker.

Fringe Biscuit writes snappy and succinct reviews in the form of tweets:

The Sensemaker. In an innovative blend of dance & physical theatre, @WomansMove depicts the systematic erosion of autonomy under an automated, mindless bureaucracy. Concepts of choice & consent are challenged on a journey from darkly comic to deeply discomfiting. Captivating. 5/5'

The Sensemaker comes to the Edinburgh Fringe this year, a show about a woman trying to meet the expectations of an artificial voice. Flipping between different languages and genres of music, her movements are precise as she strains to keep her tightly orchestrated routine in time. As the voice’s demands become absurd, she has to choose between obedience and integrity. Director, Elsa Couvreur, spoke with The Fountain about the show and her plans for the Fringe.

TF: You are performing at the Edinburgh Fringe this year, how exciting?  

Very, especially because the show I am bringing to this year’s Fringe, The Sensemaker, is the most personal work I ever made. I really love performing it, it is pretty challenging! I am really looking forward to share it with various audiences at the Fringe. This year will be my second Edinburgh Fringe and last year we brought not one, not two… But three different shows to Scotland: the short version of The Sensemaker, a group piece called Drop the Gogo and a duet in collaboration with Divisar-Mehdi Duman, Anchor. We performed only for ten days and even so, it was completely exhausting and there were moments when I thought we would not be able to make it. However, I still fell in love with the Edinburgh Fringe – I love how frenetic it is with all those many, many shows and how inspiring it is to see other artists from everywhere in the world. I am also really happy to have been selected again by Zoo Venues – I loved every Zoo show I saw last year and I feel honoured they chose The Sensemaker to be part of their 2019 programme.

TF: The Sensemaker certainly sounds interesting, what is the premise? 

The Sensemaker is a solo show; however it can almost be seen as a duet between a performer and a robotic voice. Have you ever waited on the phone for way too long, with repetitive music playing on a loop and an irritating voice telling you endlessly that your request is being processed? Yes, you have. We all have. And so does the protagonist of The Sensemaker until she is slowly stretched to her limits. Why is she waiting? We don’t know, but it seems to be of utmost importance to her. As the voice’s demands become more and more questionable, she has to choose between obedience and integrity. Mixing theatre and dance, this absurdist battle between a woman and an answering machine depicts what happens when a single individual struggles through bureaucracy and faces the gigantic machinery of an unjust system.

TF: And what drove the project, where did your influences lie? 

The Sensemaker has been created three times. I first created the very early parts of The Sensemaker in… 2012 for a festival called Les Quarts D’Heures at Théâtre Sévelin in Lausanne, Switzerland. This platform gives to emerging choreographers an opportunity to show a 15min work. Back then, the show was called To Make Myself Clear and was very different, an except for 4 or 5 minutes that is still the same in today’s The Sensemaker. It gave me ideas for the 30min version of The Sensemaker, that was created 5 years later, in 2017, for the Théâtre de l’Abri in Geneva. And finally, the long – and, I think, final – version of the piece, lasting one hour, has been created for the Voila!Europe Festival in London last November. So in six year’s time I certainly had a lot of different influences. I tend to like dystopias – one of the reviewers said The Sensemaker looked like an episode of Black Mirror live on stage, which is a pretty flattering comparison – as well as theatre of the absurd like Beckett and Kafka. Most of all, I am such a typical millennial – I just love gifs, memes and pop culture, and I dropped a lot of inside jokes in The Sensemaker.

Also, even though I live in Switzerland, I am originally from Belgium. Having lived in two multilingual countries, it was natural for me to have different languages in this piece, however English remains the main one. And finally, the plot is inspired by Milgram’s experiment, where a volunteer had to administrate electric shocks to another person. I find that experiment fascinating – we can so easily find ourselves to obey to an unjust authority.

TF: What are your plans for the Fringe, having been before are there any tips or musts you would offer to first-time performers? 

What comes to my mind at first: try to get some good night sleep, eat healthy, don’t over work. Take care of yourself. Don’t drink too much. The Edinburgh Fringe is very intense and you will need all your energy. But also, watch as many shows as you can, especially free shows, and especially shows you would normally not go and see.  Enjoy every time you perform, even if there are only a few audience members – which will likely happen if you’re a first-timer.  I personally really want to see Hot Brown Honey for the empowerment, Shitfaced Shakespeare because I like silly stuff, as much as I can see from the Zoo programme, and random shows I never heard about.

TF: And what are your future plans beyond The Sensemaker? 

I am co-directing the collective Woman’s Move with my colleague Iona D’Annuzio. We don’t create any work together, but we do support each other artistically and administratively. We would love to tour the shows we already have as much as we can. After the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, The Sensemaker will be performed at the Gothenburg Fringe, the Stockholm Fringe, the Lahti Fringe and the Istanbul Fringe – very excited about that as well – and also at the Théâtre du Pommier in Neuchâtel, Switzerland and the European Cabaret Competition Niederstätter surPrize in Bolzano, Italy. Maybe this year’s Edinburgh Fringe will give us a few more opportunities, finger crossed! We do not plan on creating new work before 2020 though, but we certainly have some ideas of what will come next : a duet and another group piece, but that will be a story for the next episode!

You can see The Sensemaker at Zoo Venues, Playground 1 from 2nd – 26th August (Not Wednesdays) at 15:15. For tickets, please visit www.edfringe.com

Reportage made by TV Channel Leman Bleu about the event "La danse du Bunker" during Fête de la Danse 2019.

Featuring an interview of Iona D'Annuzio about the show Gender Cubicles.

'Elsa Couvreurin The Sensemaker yhdistää tanssia ja mimiikkaa.Sveitsiläinen tanssitaiteilija Elsa Couvreur törmäyttää esityksessä The Sensemaker persoonattoman teknologian ja inhimillisen kokemusmaailman. Esitys on koominen ja kriittinen kuva todellisuudesta, jossa asiat hoidetaan tekniikan välityksellä ja kommunikoidaan koneen kanssa.Tanssia ja mimiikkaa yhdistävässä esityksessä nykyteknologia on läsnä äänimaiseman muodossa. Esiintyjä kehollistaa koneellisen kanssakäymisen vaikutuksen ja ilmentää kokemuksen inhimillisen kirjon. Virallinen asianhoito on valahtaa teknisten ja byrokraattisten järjestelmien päättömyyksiin, mutta nainen jatkaa humoristisella neuvokkuudellaan vihoviimeiseen nöyryytykseen saakka.Teknologian ihmisiä yhdistävää ilosanomaa haastaa eri kielten ja kulttuurien kakofonia. Kanavasta toiseen surffatessa tieto on hukkua viihteeseen, kaupallisuuteen ja ideologiaan. Kuvaavasti tunnusmusiikki on syntetisoitu versio Euroopan unionin hymnistä, Beethovenin sävellyksestä Oodi ilolle. Latteimpaankin konevärssyyn reagoidaan riemukkaasti kommentoivalla koreografialla.Teos ilmentää teknologian lieveilmiöitä. Järjestelmissä ihminen typistyy numerosarjaksi ja vuorovaikutus tapahtuu fraasein, joissa ei huomioida yksilöllisiä tekijöitä ja inhimillisen elämän nyansseja. Tarkkailuun, yksityisyyden menettämiseen ja teknisiin häiriötekijöihin altistumisessa on omat riskinsä. Esitys tarjoaa mainiota asennetta, jolla vastata näihin kriittisiin kohtiin.'

Blog article by Elsa Couvreur.

"Let me introduce myself to you: my name is Elsa Couvreur and I am the artistic codirector of the collective Woman’s Move. Woman’s Move was created in 2012 and is codirected by Iona D’Annunzio and myself. Even though we do not create pieces together, we do help each other on the administrative field and support each other’s work. In our productions, we use movement as a way of exploring the social imagery present in our daily life. Our dance pieces are rhythmic and theatrical and use irony and humor as tools to communicate on various society issues.

Elsa Couvreur

’The Sensemaker’ is a mix of theatre, dance and mime and shows a woman struggling with the impossible requests of an artificial voice. I really love performing it and already did so in four different languages: French, English, Italian and German. In ‘The Sensemaker’ I tried to tackle important topics such as immigration, unemployment, new technologies or bureaucracy, and overall the feeling of being « stuck » in our lives that the generations Y and Z can feel – but with a lot of dark humor. Another reviewer (West End Penguins) described ’The Sensemaker’  as « an episode of Black Mirror live on stage »… So it can give you a better idea on what to expect! 

The creation process of ’The Sensemaker’ happened as such: at first I created the piece lasting 30 minutes for the Théâtre de l’Abri in Geneva. A year an half and quite a few tours in Europe later, I created the longer version that will be presented at the Finfringe, lasting one hour. It was very fun to create the piece and play with different tools such as body language, wordplay, audio texts, mime, acting and dance moves, working on the soundtrack and my movements at the same time. I will love to share a little bit of that in the workshop I will be giving at the Läntinen tanssin aluekeskus on Saturday 11th of May at 1PM! You should join in!

Since its creation, our collective Woman’s Move produced more than 10 projects – solo’s, duets and group pieces alike. Amongst them, ‘Drop the Gogo’, for six dancers, questions our relationship to superficiality, body image and social status. Did you know that nowadays, more pictures are taken each day than during the entire 20th century? Crazy, right? 

The Sensemaker will be performed in ÅST Studioscenen on Friday 10th of May at 20:45, and on Saturday 11th of May at 17:15.

Our coming tours, besides the Finfringe of course, will be in Geneva, Paris, Edinburgh, Göteborg, Stockholm and Neuchâtel (Switzerland). We are very excited about that as performing internationally has always been our goal – we love culture exchange and sharing with performers and audiences from all over the world.

See you soon at the Finfringe!

Elsa"

"Götterfunken in der Warteschleife
Hinter dem Namen Woman’s Move steht die Schweizer Tänzerin Elsa Couvreur, die mit ihrem Programm «Sensemaker» das Publikum in seiner Geduld auf die Probe stellt. Denn die junge Frau steckt in einerTelefonwarteschleife fest. Die Hinhaltemusik am
Telefon ätzt mit Beethovens «Freude schöner Götterfunken», die sie aber zu einer hinreissenden Tanzperformance auffordert, mit der sie sich aus der Schleife entfesselt."

"In «Sensemaker», dem Programm der Tänzerin Elsa Couvreur, balanciert eine junge Frau, gefangen in einer Telefonwarteschleife, am Rande des Wahnsinns. Fotos: Patric Spahni"

'Before watching Anchor, one couldn’t help but smile upon reading the programme notes: “Somehow, we both felt it, and we had to do a show together.” Then further on: “What do you think about doing a show on love?” and “I wanted to suggest the same theme!” This exchange took place after a destined chance meeting between the pair at a dance workshop in Switzerland.

The conversation between Switzerland-based Elsa Couvreur (Woman’s Move) and Mehdi Duman (Cie Divisar) led to the creation of a duet that follows the lives of a couple. Premiered at last year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe, it looks at the universal topic of love in all manner of wonderful and unexpected ways. Both dancers lovingly create a magical, playful, hour-long performance that is both comically uplifting and sweetly endearing. You can’t help but feel a part of their magic which is rather intimate tucked away in the warm, cosy space of the Camden People’s Theatre.

Most notable is that the two dancers have quite a lot of fun on stage. There is a delightful chemistry between them, and they share a great charisma that naturally captures the attention of the audience, where smiles, giggles and bursts of laughter are common place.

As the lights come up, the two are seen in underwear as they take turns in dragging each other across the stage, which is comically and lightly done to ‘Only You’ by The Platters, playing in the background. Later on, and fully dressed, more love ballads are featured as the pair simultaneously sing a compilation of well-known tunes to each other by the likes of Celine Dion, James Blunt and Whitney Houston.

In the show’s beginning, a thoughtful and truthful speech about love is spoken in the score, concluding with “Love is like a bird.” This sentiment is followed by a sweet and comical bird cooing that makes regular re-appearances from Mehdi Duman over the show’s duration. Other animal references appear too, one of which sees the pair playfully crawling in dog-like fashion around each other. There is meowing from Elsa Couvreur and a surprise ending where the two make a very different costume change. That conclusion is both funny and heart-warming.

Couvreur and Duman are inclusive with their watchers and get rather close to them, bringing members of the audience on stage and running around in a lively and frantic need to share their love. The audience are very much involved in all of this and are at one point clapping together with both of the dancers doing the same.

Within the naturally comedic aspects of the piece, there are moments of frustration that are exercised through screaming and shrieking at each other. Alongside this, Couvreur and Duman use different ways of saying, “I love you” or “I love you more” which becomes increasingly more competitive as they continue to express their affections. This eventually translates into a series of gestures and mouthing as they continue to describe how they love each other more, and at times becoming suggestive and saucy.

Among all the humour, there is a fondness and tenderness to their performance that is seen in the loving embraces that are exchanged, and particularly memorable in the final moments of the show. The charms and thoughtfulness of Anchor linger long after the show has ended and might make one think about the romances that they have in one’s own life.'

★★★★

'This is a joyous delight. The genesis of the piece, as described in the programme, is exactly as you would expect. They were thrown together as if by chance and invited to collaborate. And have managed to produce a brilliant collaborative work. They explore the duality of the idea of a relationship as an anchor – if it is a source of stability, is it also holding you back from fulfilling your potential?

The authenticity and integrity of the performances from Elsa Couvreur and Mehdi Duman are utterly beguiling.

Full disclosure, I am not normally a dance fan. I was, however, delighted by Elsa Couvreur’s performance in The Sensemaker and therefore jumped at the chance to see more of her work here. As with The Sensemaker, the music is varied and often non-existent. The sounds we hear are the noises of bodies coming together, breathing, sweating. The difference this time is that there are two performers, but both equally committed and energetic.

With brutal simple physicality they brilliantly render the idea that you simply can’t get past someone you are meant to be with. They render the mutual teasing and bickering as the relationship forms and coagulates. They show the to-ing and fro-ing of power and attraction.

The show is sensual and erotic from the outset, when both performers emerge in their underwear in a set strewn with their clothes. The effect is not dissipated as they get dressed again – indeed this is reminiscent of the scenes in Don’t Look Now when Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie’s lovemaking and dressing are spliced together.

One of my problems with dance is the frustration that the actors cannot talk to each other, thereby losing one of our most fundamental means of communication. This show ingeniously turns that on its head by playing a scene where the protagonists dance through the soundtrack to their first meeting. Their direct physical embodiment of their incipient mutual attraction to the backtrack of party hubbub and their relatively banal chat is masterfully done, to exquisite effect.

If there are criticisms, you could perhaps argue that there is not enough development of the theme. We could perhaps have seen more arguing, jealousy, boredom. But my overall sense was that this was a joyful exploration of the delight of two people stumbling across each other and falling inexorably in love.

There is a primal aspect to any coupling – we know this has been going on for millennia. In an hilarious climax to proceedings, this is brought home to us to the strains of Elvis and a madcap costume change.

This was a collaboration between Cie Divisar and Woman’s Move. Look out for further performances from them.'

★★★

This double-bill of dance pieces both star an impressive and athletic Elsa Couvreur – often centre stage without even music.

The Sensemaker is the tale of a woman’s struggle with a Kafka-esque bureaucracy. This play is in part commentary on the arbitrary nature of dealing with faceless machines, telephones and surveillance; part tale on the nature of the hoops we are increasingly forced to jump through as power dynamics in so many areas of our lives widen.

Couvreur dances alone for the whole hour. She follows the increasingly difficult, challenging and bizarre instructions of an unnamed disconnected and clearly mechanised voice as these get ever more bizarre.  There are times when this becomes uncomfortable. Having made it clear they can see where she is, they then make her strip completely naked. Which goes on for long enough for the audience to feel uncomfortable and voyeuristic – which is perhaps the point.

For me, the piece ran slightly too long. The original was only 30 minutes and I would have liked to have seen this to compare. But in its length, it did manage to invoke the oppression of mundanity that dealing with such an unreasonable and unhuman system engenders.

The Anchor on the other hand is full of utterly charming joy. The tale of two lovers coming together, falling apart, communicating, miscommunicating and ending up together was expressed with passion, joie de vivre and a dance that showed the incredible core strength of both participants.

Again this piece had no original music, but played well with the classics it used and the silences were well-punctuated with the sounds of their lovers pursuit.

This was – perhaps the easier piece to love. It had all the fun and silliness of a new relationship. And perhaps that made it more accessible than The Sensemaker. This was an emotional space you wanted to be in.

Overall, both works were impressive and enjoyable if occasionally somewhat baffling.

Les 21 et 26 novembre dernier, six danseuses et danseurs sont venus chambouler les habitudes du hall d’Uni-Mail, à Genève. À travers trois tableaux de dix minutes chacun, les artistes nous intriguent, d’abord, puis nous embarquent dans un univers qui questionne le genre sous des rythmes breakbeat. C’est le dernier projet du collectif Woman’s Move, qui, à travers la puissance du corps, cherche à bousculer l’ordre établi et éveiller les réflexions. 

Dans les locaux du Projet – H107 pour la création en danse contemporaine, j’ai le privilège d’assister à l’une des dernières répétitions avant le jour J. Devant la petite assistance, les danseuses et danseurs présentent leur spectacle, concentrés et énergiques, avant que la chorégraphe et responsable du projet, Iona D’Annunzio, propose que nous donnions nos avis et d’éventuelles recommandations. Une ouverture à la collaboration avec le public qui traduit bien la volonté d’accessibilité dont m’a parlé Iona. « Gender Cubicles » veut questionner le genre, mais surtout provoquer la réflexion chez le spectateur. Pour cela, elle a créé un spectacle accessible tout en restant subtile.

Un spectacle pensé spécialement pour le hall d’Uni-Mail. Lorsque la musique commence, la fourmilière universitaire s’étonne et ralentit. Les curieux regardent et s’approchent. Certains sourient ou sortent leur portable pour filmer, d’autres se penchent depuis les étages pour observer le spectacle et les plus motivés osent même quelques pas de danse au rythme de la musique. les danseuses et danseurs jouent avec l’architecture du lieu, chaque tableau se déroulant sur une scène différente. Une première fois sur les grandes marches aux allures de gradins d’amphithéâtre, ayant chacun·e sa marche et sa couleur de tenue sportive, les danseur·seuse·s nous offrent un véritable tableau en trois dimensions sur un bon rythme tapant. Puis, en face, sur les deux escaliers formant un triangle, ils·elles montent, descendent, changent de côté, mais surtout transmettent leur énergie à travers des chorégraphies belles et dynamiques. Pendant un court moment, le temps est suspendu et une succession de chorégraphies questionnent les gestuelles féminine et masculine; qui les fait, qu’est-ce qu’elles signifient? Enfin, au centre du hall, au niveau du sol, ils·elles détonnent et s’abandonnent à leurs danses dans un dernier souffle explosif.

Un interlude qui vous prend par surprise, une bonne dose d’énergie qui met du « punch » dans la journée, une coupure captivante qui invite subtilement à la réflexion sur le monde et sur soi-même. Par des danses et musiques aux mouvements et sonorités actuelles, cette performance pousse à se questionner sur la place de son propre corps et de ses gestes et, plus loin, remet en question les normes de genre dans la société d’aujourd’hui.

Mis en mots lors d’une table ronde accueillant deux acteur·trice·s de la scène artistique de la région et une doctorante à l’université de Genève, les questionnements liant le genre et les pratiques artistiques sont, dans ce spectacle, traduits en gestes et surtout en émotions, offrant une autre manière d’aborder ce thème et d’éveiller les consciences. Cette performance est une alarme qui veut retentir autrement que par les mots.
À la fin, des danseur·seuse·s essoufflé·e·s et satisfait·e·s, une chorégraphe contente, des applaudissements et cris d’encouragements de spectateur·trices·s touché·e·s viennent clore ce beau spectacle. Parmi le public, les discussions concernant le genre se prolongent, objectif atteint? En tout cas pour certain·e·s, reste à convaincre les autres! Pour cela, le collectif Woman’s Move prévoit déjà un deuxième round lors de la semaine de l’égalité en mars, peut-être à Uni-Mail, peut-être dans un autre bâtiment universitaire de Genève. Car c’est cela l’intelligence de cette performance, pouvoir s’adapter à tout type de lieux, et être adaptée à tous les publics.

Interview of Elsa Couvreur, conducted by Laura Jaramillo Duque.

In this series for Voila! Europe Theatre Festival, Laura Jaramillo Duque interviews artists about their work, the shows they’re bringing to Voila, and their plans for the future…

Laura spoke to Elsa Couvreur, creator and performer of The Sensemaker (Cockpit Theatre, 7 November).

The Sensemaker shows the inner turmoil of a woman as she tries to meet the impossible expectations of a synthetic voice. Smartly dressed, standing behind a phone, she is slowly stretched to her limits. Flipping between different languages and genres of music, her moves are precise as she strains to keep her tightly orchestrated routine in time. As the voice’s demands become absurd, she has to choose between obedience and integrity. Will her hopes to succeed be stronger than her growing confusion?

LJ: What drew you to the Voila festival? What opportunities do you hope it will open for you?

EC: I knew the Voila Festival because I went last year to see a show of a friend of mine who performed at the BE Festival, so I also heard about the Voila because of the BE festival in Birmingham. When I came last year I really liked the programme, I could not see most of the shows, but I looked at it and I thought it was really nice. Also, I really liked the concept of trying to have different artists from all over Europe; so I decided to apply.

About the opportunities I think it already opened opportunities for me, the first opportunity was to perform The Sensemaker in a long version because it was created specially for the Voila Festival. The other opportunities were to get to meet people, like the people that work at The Cockpit and also working at different festivals. It already opened opportunities for me to present my show at other festivals that I’ll be giving more information soon. Also I invited some guests from the press industry to have a few reviews, which were really positive, that’s also great for the piece.

LJ: What is the value of cross-cultural theatre?

EC: Its value is to discover something that surprises you and that comes from a different logic than yours. I realised that also a company from Switzerland coming to the UK is different because I have a feeling that people in the UK have more of a culture of stand-up comedy and musicals, I feel they want to laugh when they go to a theatre, it is an important part of it. An example is when I was at the Edinburg Fringe Festival you could see on their flyers comments like: “it’s hilarious, is really funny,” and it feels like its very important for people, for the audience in the UK. While in Switzerland is very different, it is more performative, profound or conceptual. The fact that my piece is funny is something that really add more people to the show, for me that is really interesting to observe, like how different audiences react to the same piece, also how reactive the audience is because people in the UK are more used to laugh while people in other places laugh about different things, probably because they think it is disrespectful. This also changes the look that I have on my piece, from being a funny piece to being more of a dark piece; it really depends on the reactions of the audience. It also depends on the reason why people go to theatre and what they like to see.

LJ: How does your cultural background affect your creative process?

EC: That is a tricky question because I am originally Belgian and I’ve been living in Switzerland for 10 years, I came when I was 18 that is just the moment when I was growing up, so I suppose that part of my cultural background is Belgian and part is Swiss. I guess I’ve been influenced by both cultures a lot. Also, I went to a Ballet school until I was 18, it was very academic and strict; it was very centred in classical techniques. So it was very funny because I discovered Belgium dance after I left Belgium. This type of dance is very theatrical and I really like it, so I wonder if I was influenced without knowing.

LJ: Why London?

EC: I guess because of the Voila Festival and again because it’s in the UK. Also I applied to many festivals and it seems that the ones that liked the piece are in the UK for the moment. I liked about the festival that there was a lot of variety in the programme and also the themes of cultural barriers, cultural differences, modern world, injustice and gender were common to all of the shows of the festival. I feel that everyone had something to say about the world and how it is now.

LJ: Why did you create Woman’s Move?

EC: I realised I wanted to create some pieces and I didn’t want to that alone; I wanted to create on my own but I didn’t feel strong enough to have a company on my own. So I talked to two friends of mine 6 years ago and they agreed, so we created Woman’s Move collective and we are three artistic directors. We started with small projects that we felt like doing, we didn’t choreograph together, but is always like if one has an idea and lead the project while the other ones support her in terms of paper work, administration, publicity and all the things on the side. So we change the roles so that each one can lead a project and create a piece. It is quite nice because is very heavy to have a structure on your own and its something that a lot of people that don’t work in the arts is know and is that you spend 90% of your time not doing art, you are doing administrative things instead, so when you share this its really nice. It is actually a job, people live for that kind of job that they do fulltime, is just that when you are a small structure you need to do that job yourself. I had to learn like three other jobs besides choreographer; I had to learn just by doing it how to administrate, how to be an accountant and how to be a community manager. I think a lot of artists are in the same position.

LJ: Why is dance an important art form to question the society we live at?

EC: Because it comes from the guts, it makes people feel things because before they think of them. For example what you said about this piece making you feel a certain way is very nice to hear because is what I want to do is people to feel empathy so that they can feel my situation, so that they can feel the same things that I felt: shame, humiliation, vulnerability, wanting to resist and not knowing how to do it. I think that dance is a very good way to make people feel a certain way without explaining the situation. I think that if you try to explain emotions to the audience then you will not me able to make them feel them because dance is a very instinctive form of art, you just have to move and let your body do something to deliver a message in a natural way. There is a common thing in most of arts and is how do you make it understandable and accessible for other people. The way dance can communicate is with feelings rather than toughs.

LJ: How did you manage the timings of your show, how did you find a balance between too much and not enough time for you and the audience to wait?

EC: It was very nice performance for me, I really felt the audience with me and I think this piece requires a lot of concentration from the audience in the beginning because I am just waiting for 5 minutes. So it’s like: “Hey guys, we are going to wait together.”

I made this possible by trying different timings and trying to feel when it was too long for me. Also, because I performed this piece in the short version that is 25 minutes long, actually the solo just existed in that version and it was really nice to make it longer for Voila. Sometimes I performed the short version outside and it is very tough because I needed to make the times shorter because people is not locked up with me, so it was much more difficult to have the attention and to have the same effects. But in general just by trying, make it a little bit longer, a little bit shorter and see how it felt. Also in the whole piece I played with timing to make it a little bit too long or a little bit too short.

I use to play music and I am really sensitive to music and to rhythm, so somehow it is a part of it. Also in acting it is about right timing and right rhythm.

LJ: How does repetition allow you to challenge our ideas of authority?

EC: that particular part where I repeat a lot of gestures with different sounds, in itself is not questioning authority, that part is more of an introduction to make people come into this absurd world in which the piece is going to happen. For me this is like a view of the piece because you have a lot of different languages, I repeat the same gestures over and over again and they fit every language, every part that the people say. For me it is questioning the lack of communication and lack of understanding between different people, different languages, different cultures and different countries. In one of the reviews that I had they said something about the authority of a continent that has more than 30 countries and probably twice as many languages, so I think is about that because it can be hard to communicate.

LJ: In your piece you only spoke for a few seconds when everything was dark, how does authority erase your voice and your capacity of speaking by yourself?

EC: yes I think so, also because in the piece there is this moment that I start dancing the little stupid music of the phone; it is one of the only moments in the piece that I am really joyful and then I am interrupted by this voice telling me that I am being filmed in order to improve their services. This is also something real in our world because with Internet, our phone and gps we are constantly observed. For example now we are talking on Skype and someone can hear this is they want to crack it, I have a camera so probably someone can look at that as well, or when I take my phone somewhere there is a gps on it so people can track me. So for me this moment of the piece where everything goes dark is the moment that the machine stops working and that is why I talk, cause I feel relieved but also a bit panicked when I talk because there is a problem, I am not happy with the machine but at the same time I cannot do nothing without machines, even if it hurt me in different ways. We now depend on machines.

LJ: What are your next projects?

EC: for the moment I have the premier of another project of my company, but this time is not me choreographing is one of my friends of the company, the piece is called Gender Cubicles and it is questioning the gender rules and the rules we have to fit in and follow, and those that we can break regarding gender. It is a project that Iona made in collaboration with the university in Geneva, so we worked with a round table as well and I am really exited about that. For what I personally do I have exiting news for next year that I will be releasing soon on social media…

★★★★★

I went to see a short show called 'The Sensemaker', by the company Woman's Move, as part of the Voila!Europe Festival at the Cockpit Theatre. The show is described as follows:

The Sensemaker shows a woman battling with an answering machine, trying to meet the expectations of an artificial voice. Flipping between different languages and genres of music, her moves are precise as she strains to keep her tightly orchestrated routine in time. As the voice's demands become absurd, she has to choose between obedience and integrity.

The thing that I loved about this show is how relatable it is and how different people will get something different from it. You can take it as simple as you want, it's just a woman having to deal with those automated systems we've all dealt whith during a customer service phone call. Or you can read more into it, and take it as a way of exposing how vulnerable we are when someone in a position of power makes absurd demands to give us something we need. Or a representation of the nightmare it is to deal with bureaucracy. The best thing of this show is that everyone will relate to it, but everyone in a different manner.

In just 50 minutes you can see how the woman struggles to follow all the requirements, reaching a point where, like the synopsis said, she has to choose between obedience and integrity. Having studied psychology I understand what happens in these kinds of situations. If you like the topic of obedience under pressure, search for Milgram's experiment and you'll be surprised of what people can do. That kind of surprise is palpable in the audience as the show goes on.

Elsa Couvreur wrote the show and is the only performer in it. Originally a 30 minute show it was extended for this festival, and I believe it has a perfect duration. She barely speaks in the whole 50 minutes, apart from a couple of sentences and some lip sync, and that's the beauty of the show, being able to transmit all it has to transmit without saying much.

I think 'The Sensemaker' is a brilliant piece of theatre. It was like watching an episode of 'Black Mirror' live on stage. Starting as comedy you can see how suddenly it gets a bit darker and, the most important thing, it leaves you thinking, wondering how we behave, how technology runs our lives telling us what to do, or anything else that you found you can relate to. I'm sure you'll find something.

★★★★

Voilà Europe! is a festival of theatre which celebrates Europe’s multicultural and multilingual diversity of drama, dance, music and more. It is running at multiple venues across London until 18th November, and on the evidence of tonight’s performance, it would be well worth checking out.

‘The Sensemaker’ is basically unclassifiable. It is a one woman show, the concept, choreography and performance are by Elsa Couvreur of the Swiss-based Woman’s Move dance collective. It does, however, feature an outstanding contribution from the voice responsible for all the recorded messages. It ranges from the hilariously funny to the toe-curlingly embarrassing and the downright disturbing. It is at once a celebration of the madcap absurdity of a continent containing more than 30 countries and probably twice as many languages as well as a grim reminder of the horrors wrought in this place when the laughter stops. It is a dance show in which the protagonist spends much of the time standing still. It is a piece of mime which can get very noisy indeed. It is both a dream and a nightmare.

Our heroine shuffles nervously onto the corner of the Cockpit’s unforgiving stage, surrounded on three sides. She is dressed as if for a job interview, clutching her handbag demurely, unsure whether to sit on the only available chair. We are engaged, as though fellow candidates also waiting our turn. In that awkward moment where we hope she does well, but not too well.

Instructions begin to be dictated from the old-fashioned telephone on the table opposite. It transpires that she has made a ‘request’ which is being ‘processed’ – the shades of Kafka, Orwell and The Prisoner collide when the machine starts to refer to her repeatedly by her number. She gets a moment to explain the request but it is of course lip-synched in another language (Swiss German) so I did not understand it but that is perhaps the point.

The recorded voice is an absolute masterstroke. The voice is exactly the one we hear on our phones, tubes and buses, with exactly the same imprecisions of tone, emphasis and language which may seem trivial but end up driving you mad. Also the choice of Muzak – the midi version of the Ode to Joy – amusing and witty as it is at first outing becomes, as in real life, increasingly infuriating. There is a lovely riff where our heroine gets deeply engaged with conducting the on-hold music, and is rudely interrupted by the return of the voice. We have all been there.

There are so many good things here – an extended sequence of lip synching to multilingual soundtrack – I recognised Ewan McGregor in Trainspotting, and what I think was a French jingle advertising Formica among many other delights – was made funnier still by the repetition of the same gestures for each of the contrasting pieces. When Elsa actually does get to dance she is very good, in spite of the machine’s instructions.

The funniest sequence was when the machine appeared to go wrong, and gabbled out an immensely long series of nonsensical instructions. Our heroine nevertheless mastered them and proceeded to deliver an accomplished dance routine to the tune of ‘I’m So Excited’.

The most poignant sequence was when the machine issued the instruction to get undressed. The sense of Nazi extermination camps was inescapable, and even the treatment of today’s refugees. When she is allowed to get dressed and finally hears that her request has been granted we are all complicit again in wondering whether it was worth it.

This is a work that was developed originally to run for 30 minutes. In this evening’s incarnation it ran for about 50 and I think it has potential to expand further. I, for one, will be looking out for future possibilities. If you get a chance to see this or anything by the collective, seize it with both hands. If anything proves that Europe is worth more than endless Brexit wrangling, this does. Voilà Europe, indeed!

Gender Cubicles (choreographed by Iona D'Annunzio) published as Picture of the Month in the magazine Go Out.

Picture by Varvara Vedia.

Greenside Nicolson Square threw up a delightful hour in the company of Elsa Couvreur of Woman's Move and Mehdi Duman in Anchor. In a wonderfully observed probing, the performers open the door on love, something they cannot escape from, however hard they try, or at least they think they try. Their personalities shone through in the quality dance and light-touch humour. I smiled for hours afterwards.

At ZOO Charteris, Couvreur also presented The Sensemaker, an amusing solo showing her battling the impossible expectations of a recorded telephone voice, and the engaging Drop the Gogo, in which six go-go dancers question their dreams and ambitions.

★★★★

There’s no missing the contemporary allusions in the two performance pieces from Woman's Move.

In The Sensemaker, an unnamed woman (Elsa Couvreur), neatly dressed in a blouse and black skirt, waits in a queue. We are never quite sure what the queue is for but the experience is familiar.

A recorded voice tells her she is number 3854782 and asks her to move to the centre of the room. The music playing while she waits is Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, the anthem adopted by the European Union.

But there is not much joy in just waiting, so when number 3854782 hears voices in different languages, she lip-synchs and matches what is said to hand and arm movements, only pausing in comic shock to the words, ”what’s the point of living if you haven’t got a dick.”

Her gestures later become more exuberant, as if she is conducting Beethoven, and then she dances.

All this is interrupted by the recorded voice requiring her to answer personal, sexual and political questions with one clap for yes or two claps for no.

Finally, as she is asked to demonstrate her suitability by dancing for the machine, a technical hitch means she is required to begin the process again.

But by that time, the woman has had enough. Smiling and with a wave of her hand, she leaves.

Maybe she was attending an audition, or as a migrant seeking entry to the EU. Perhaps metaphorically she represented the UK forced through endless hoops in their negotiation process. And if it’s the latter, then this could possibly make the show the first to have anything positive to say about Brexit.

The six dancers of Drop the Gogo have jobs, and what could be better than dancing for a living, which they do initially with a good deal of pleasure atop six boxes.

But very quickly, the movements become more mechanical, repetitive and uncomfortable. They try on other clothes, other jobs such as the lab coat of the doctor, though each in turn looks part of the ritual of the GoGo dance.

Restless, they don militaristic caps, their dance incorporating the rhythmic sound of marching as they fire from bubble guns creating striking, colourful images across the stage.

Just as it is looking quite spectacular, there is darkness followed by a moment of light illuminating a frozen image of some terrible war atrocity.

These fine dance pieces are enjoyable to watch and have something playfully subversive to say about the world.

★★★

Falling in love is easy, staying in love is harder - something everyone who has experienced it will recognise in this playful two-hander. Dancers Elsa Couvreur and Mehdi Duman, of companies Woman's Move and Divisar respectively, arrive on stage dressed in their underwear. They drag each other around the floor, at turns weighed down by the responsibility or enjoying the ride, echoing the complex nature of any romantic relationship.

Once dressed and upright, the push and pull begins. They try to walk but bump shoulders, ramming harder and harder until it's part sexual act, part holding each other back. The inevitable resentment has arrived, and Couvreur and Duman are left screaming into the air in frustration. But - and it's a big but - they still love each other, so what next?

The highs and lows of love are nicely observed here, but Anchor operates solely on one level, which feels like a missed opportunity. It's not until the lovers briefly cling onto each other as if their lives depended on it, that any kind of emotional resonance arrives.

★★★★

This double-bill of physical theatre delivers its messages lightly, but addresses timely topics around the exploitation of workers – while remaining intriguing and entertaining throughout.

The Sensemaker, a solo piece from Elsa Couvreur, sees an anonymous woman from the near future taking part in the phone-interview from hell. Many of us will recognise the basics of this situation, but a handful of clever subversions – the phone which doesn't ring in quite the way it ought to, the unexpected change to the music-on-hold – turn what could be a slightly predictable scenario into one that stays surprising and fresh. There's plenty of comedy here, but also some necessary darkness; the woman's identified only by a number, and the computerised voice conducting the interview inevitably segues into asking questions about her personal life.

The mainstay of the piece, though, is a lengthy sequence where Couvreur lip-synchs to a series of voice-overs, using exaggerated gestures to illustrate the words. The fragmentary quotes she mimes along to are drawn from many sources, yet the same gestures come back again and again – illustrating very different phrases, but fitting each one just as well. It's a lot of fun, but it's also intellectually interesting: proof that the most individualistic things or people can, on the surface, be reduced to resemble each other.

So what does it all mean? I'd guess there's no single right answer to that. For me, alongside the obvious humour, there's a point about the difference between volition and obligation; when the woman passes the time by dancing, it's a sunny and sparkling moment, but it feels completely different when the anonymous voice orders her to do the same. She does have agency, though, and the low-key way she chooses to express it is a fitting finale to the work.

The second piece, Drop The Gogo, tackles related themes in a contrasting style. This time, far from a solo performance, the stage is filled with movement; a mixed-gender cast display themselves on podiums, and dance with what initially seems like free-spirited joy. Their movements, too, are both individual and synchronised. They're able to express themselves – but only to a degree.

And of course, they're not as happy as they seem. The dance grows less joyful, more desperate, more mechanical – and then in a series of solo vignettes, we see what these people would really like to be doing with their time. One wanted to be a doctor, one wanted to be a construction worker, one a fireman. This isn't a preachy or worthy piece – the mildly sensual tone of the early dance is retained throughout – but there's a general sense of ambitions lost, and cynicism gained.

A small part of me asks whether go-go dancing is an easy target, and the piece does carry the slightly questionable implication that dancing in a nightclub is a second-class career. But it's a well-constructed work, which makes the point it wants to make with eloquence and wit. And the final, hopeful image – a twist to a segment which seemed to be heading somewhere much darker – is a truly uplifting visual highlight.

The Sensemaker and Drop The Gogo are very different pieces, but they complement each other in asking probing questions about employment and individuality. The combination makes for an entertaining but, ultimately, thought-provoking show.

★★★★★

“What is love?” a voice asks as the beginning of Anchor. “It can burn you… It can consume you.” We all have our own answers too. What is undoubtedly true, as the voice continues, is that love is a “strange, material, abstract force.” In some wise advice it suggests, “Where we go wrong is in trying to tame it.”

The idea that, “Love is like a bird” is the cue for some coo-ing dove like sounds. It’s also the start of a wonderfully accurate probing into the subject as choreographers and performers Elsa Couvreur and Mehdi Duman open the door on their relationship, playfully and with an always light-touch dig into their wants and needs.

The opening sets the tone. With both of them only in black underwear, he drags her, cave-man style, across the floor, through scattered discarded clothing, to the strains of ‘Only You’, before roles are reversed. We’re not told how we got here, but it doesn’t take much imagination.

When they dress, there’s a lot of pushing and pulling. They walk towards each other and dodge unsuccessfully. It’s love. A situation they are in but cannot escape from. However hard they may try, or at least think they try, they are anchored to each other.

There are references to pleasures and frustrations, and cats and dogs. There’s a little bit of audience participation. Personalities shine through. It’s all done with a smile and a sense of fun that you cannot help but to fall for.

There are love songs aplenty. One well done scene sees them swap in and out of different songs, using the words as a sort of discussion. “I will always love you,” sings one, very badly (deliberately) but with so much enthusiasm you believe fully.

Of course, there are frustrations and arguments too, the latter complete with pointy fingers. And they are often arguments about nothing really. “I love you more,” says one. “No, I love you more,” insists the other. Ah, love. Not always easy, you see. You just can’t help but recognise the situations and see yourself in it all.

Do you remember first meetings? The soundtrack includes a lovely recording of what sounds like a first meeting in a café, somewhere, the pair figuratively feeling each other out. It is very theatrical but there’s some quality dance in Anchor too, but again all done with that tongue firmly in that cheek.

It ends with the audience left alone to the strains of a cover of Elvis Presley’s ‘Can’t help falling in love’. It is a quite superb idea that allows a moment of reflection. Except that it’s not quite the end, because Couvreur and Duman have a surprise in store. Let’s just say it involves orange dinosaurs. Hilarious.

I smiled from start to finish, and was still doing so an hour later. “I can’t help falling in love with you” go the words of the song. And I defy anyone not to fall in love with Anchor, and the delightful Couvreur and Duman.

★★★★

Arriving in her smart skirt and blouse, Elsa Couvreur looks interview-ready and eager to please. But frustration builds as time and again she’s told by a disembodied voice that it will be her turn soon, and in the meantime, here’s some wait music.

We’ve all been there, hanging on the phone, driven mad by the repetitive tune – but few use their time so inventively. Lip-synching in different languages at speed, Couvreur delivers cinematic lines (including a great quote from Trainspotting), each accompanied by fast-paced hand-gestures. When she eventually gets the chance to sell herself, Couvreur is presented with a series of tick-box, yes and no questions, that do nothing to elicit her true personality. We feel her pain – and ultimate redemptive joy – as she chooses another path.

Swiss company Woman’s Move clearly has something to say about work, because from The Sensemaker we move to Drop the Gogo, a completely different yet complementary piece. How we choose to spend our time, especially during the hours of work is the focus here too. Six black plinths sit empty and expectant, until one by one, a dancer slides out from inside and stands up. Dressed for the nightclub, they quickly pick up the beat and start to dance. Their moves are confident, fast, glorious to watch – like dancers in a slick video. But it’s clear all is not as it seems; they pose for the camera but are these people dancing for their own pleasure, or for ours? Reaching inside the plinth, they pull out uniforms and tools for copious trades, from plumber to doctor to police officer. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” asks a voice. The answer is left hanging in the air.

“Slick, fun and packed with charisma”

★★★★

Often contemporary dance can come across as very abstract and inaccessible to normal people. Narratives or themes can be lost in conceptual musings, and it becomes hard for audiences to connect with the action on stage. With this double-bill, however, Swiss company Woman’s Move are presenting work that is more down-to earth – where dancers are people in situations we can all relate to – and the result is enjoyable and engaging.

First up is solo piece The Sensemaker, which sees dancer and choreographer Elsa Couvreur arriving on stage dressed and ready for a job interview, only to be greeted by a ringing phone and a disembodied voice giving her instructions. The tension is palpable through the awkward waiting and uncertainty, though frustration soon builds as the repetition of the automated voice continues. Throughout this sequence there are several comic moments when progress through ‘the system’ is made, only for it to be undermined later, and Couvreur’s facial expressions communicate all we need to know. It’s a fun and simple piece, with a charming interlude to set up the next.

In contrast, Drop the Gogo features six dancers performing an energetic and upbeat routine, where they seamlessly drop in and out of cannon, unison and extended motifs as befits their personalities. There’s a playful, childish element to the piece, highlighted by the costumes and roles each dancer takes on when reliving what they wanted to be when they grew up – something we might all cringe at now. Overall, it’s slick, fun and packed with charisma.

A loose theme of career and expectation threads the two works together, yet the playful irreverence of the choreography shows that this is a company not too concerned with following convention and who are determined to have fun in their own way. Throughout both pieces there’s just enough comprehension to follow what’s going on, though the overall creativity and mood is what comes across most clearly. This isn’t stuffy or stuck-up dance you need to labour through.

Overall, The Sensemaker and Drop the Gogo as a double-bill is fun show that’s full of charm, and well worth watching as your “something different” choice this year. It also once again strengthens ZOO’s leading position as the destination for contemporary dance at the Fringe. Dance fans, please go and check out this show and more of ZOO’s programme, I’ve yet to be disappointed by anything they present.

★★★

Contemporary dance isn't widely known for its cool credentials, nor for its comedy. This double bill from millennial Swiss choreographer Elsa Couvreur is on the path to change all that.

In The Sensemaker she performs an amusing and thought-provoking duet with a recorded voice, in a dramatic world where waiting on an automated telephone call is equated with sitting in an actual waiting room. Couvreur's smart outfit suggests a job interview, perhaps, and our attention is drawn to micro-movements – blinks and swallows and muscle twitches. When asked to leave a message, Couvreur lipsyncs to a diverse variety of multilingual broadcasts, each accompanied by the same set of gestures that, impressively, make sense in every context. Some segments of more traditional modern dance choreography entertain, but are the least interesting parts.

Drop the Gogo ups the ante even further. A team of six podium dancers bring Couvreur's metamodern music video creation to life with distinct personalities and glittering nightclub fashion. The show is a high energy blast of information overload. All the dance styles, all the career options, all the social media snaps stand in for the overwhelming excess of the digital environment. The piece is exceedingly current, layering fun and shimmer over networks of hairline fractures that threaten to crash.

In both pieces, choreography is combined with visual theatre elements to create an entertaining and surprising hour.

Article about BE Festival citing "The Sensemaker" 

"Elsa Couvreur from Woman’s Move interacts with a robotic voice on stage and therefore ironically negotiates the feeling of being “on hold” in European bureaucracy in “The Sensemaker”"

Article about BE Festival citing "The Sensemaker" 

"The Sensemaker by Woman’s Move of Switzerland is the first piece – the story of one woman (played by Elsa Couvreur) waiting for human interaction from an automated phone message and her increasing frustrations, bringing to my mind the increasing role technology plays in our lives and the way in which bureaucracy is perceived. The dancing, mixed with elements of mime and sign language, builds with increasing frenzy and keeps the audience and myself hooked.

The spoken word/singing is no less impressive, combining a bewildering array of languages and sources such as Jethro Tull, Rammstein, Nicki Minaj, yodelling, and Eurovision, all with the constant of Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ bursting through exuberantly at the crescendo. It is an excellent performance, a funny and triumphant start to the evening that leaves me hopeful of a great night."

Article about BE Festival citing "The Sensemaker" 

"Elsa Couvreur’s simple but sophisticated solo performance The Sensemaker (★★★★) sees her battling frustration as she is kept interminably on hold at the mercy of an exasperating automated voice.

As a tinny – but somehow still glorious – muzak version of Beethoven’s ninth symphony plays on a loop, she rehearses a sequence of simple gestures. Then her call is unexpectedly answered, and the soundtrack lurches into a rapid collage of words and music in multiple languages, chopping bewilderingly from French commercials, to German metal, to Jake Gyllenhaal discussing Smurf reproduction.

A warm and skilful performer, Couvreur conveys much with wry glances and apologetic shrugs, slowing and accelerating her mimes to fit the rhythms of the scrambled text. Her determination to express herself amidst the sensory overload is immediately relatable, an ideal metaphor for our interconnected world, and an absorbing highlight in this diverse and engaging festival."

Article about BE Festival citing "The Sensemaker" 

"The first performance of the evening hailed from Switzerland with Woman’s Move’s The Sensemaker. This single handed piece gave us an interpretation of what it means to fit into corporate standards. The setting was strikingly simple and as usual, an elaborate set was not needed as the piece spoke for itself. We saw a woman enter dressed in formal office attire, with an uncomfortable composure. A computerised voice-over was used that sounded office answering machines with hold music and standard ‘thank you for your patience’ messages. While listening to the sounds of the machine with us, the woman became more and more impatient as the wait went on. The woman repeated the same physical actions, to different lines cut from television shows, films and songs. The piece showed us the ways in which people can interpret our actions and words and highlighted the feelings we get when we are not listened to. The Sensemaker was an interesting display of dance, physical theatre and spoken word."

Article about BE Festival citing "The Sensemaker" 

"The Sensemaker (Woman’s Move, Switzerland) opens with an attractive young woman, soberly but expensively attired. Is she waiting for an interview?

A telephone – an old school proper one that can be satisfyingly slammed down, starts ringing with increasing, disembodied menace. She becomes drawn into a dysfunctional and increasingly psychotic call-centre matrix of recorded replies and ‘please hold’ muzak interlude menu options. Her obvious option is to walk away – but curiosity is a catalyst few can resist.

The conceit of this shared, ubiquitous experience is taken to extreme abstraction. She becomes possessed by a manic mime synchronised sequence of cable/radio-channel skipping hysteria. Random multi-lingual snatches include Trainspotting Rent-boy’s rant about the Scots’ alleged, supine surrender to the bastard English. The multi-lingual audience appreciates many more.

Superficially, a caustic satire of the vacuous faux sincerity of out-sourced call centre ennui, there develops a more sinister theme of data-trawling. The electronica banal emasculation of Ode To Joy becomes an odour of despair. An homage to Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange does not escape notice, likewise the irony of it being the official EU anthem. Ingenious, subversive and scurrilous, this Swiss role reversal surreality suggests Harry Lime will need to update/delete his put-down cuckoo-clock trope. Seems we can never hang-up on the inner-space dystopian nightmare hang-ups of J.G. Ballard/Philip K. Dick.

 ★★★½

Article about BE Festival citing "The Sensemaker" 

"First up is THE SENSEMAKER – an absurdist piece from Swiss company, Woman’s Move.  A young woman, smartly dressed, enters.  It’s a job interview situation, perhaps.  A disembodied, automated voice instructs her to wait; we recognise its speech patterns  from so-called ‘customer service’.  An electronic version of Beethoven’s Ode To Joy play on a loop.  The young woman waits and reacts… At last, it’s her turn and she launches into a dazzling display, lip-synching a range of voices in a range of languages, including a clip of Ewan McGregor having a rant in Trainspotting.   She accompanies the words with a tight and repetitive sequence of gestures.  It’s quite hypnotic to behold.  This young woman is an expressive and skilful comedian.  She is put on hold again, then required to clap Yes or No answers to a series of increasingly bizarre and intrusive questions.  Ultimately, inevitably, it all goes wrong, as these interactions often do.  Accessible, relatable, charming and funny, this piece highlights the frustrations of our interactions with technology and the unsatisfactory nature of the dehumanised versions of themselves organisations present to the world.  I loved it."

Article about BE Festival citing "The Sensemaker" 

"A woman enters a waiting room, dressed for an interview. She’s quiet, open but not pushy, and her smile – broad but polite and without teeth – has been carefully practised to impress confidence and enthusiasm, though not too much. She stands, puts down her bag, picks it up again, sits and stands, fidgeting. Eventually a phone rings and is answered, only for an automated message to kick in telling her to wait some more.

In The Sensemaker, Woman’s Move masterfully show us how even the most minimalist, one-woman show is capable of eliciting an immediate and powerful reaction, banking on a familiar set-up to stir cringe-inducing memories. Which of us hasn’t been in a situation like this before? Our stomachs lurch in dread anticipation of the interview ahead.

Except in this case, our protagonist never actually gets through to a human being – instead proving her “patience”, “motivation” and “determination” by sitting through endless tinny rounds of “Ode to Joy”, broken up occasionally by the robotic, pre-recorded voice. So now in place of interview anxiety, we’re experiencing the exasperation of trying to deal with large, understaffed, bureaucratic institutions. In the UK, it might be HMRC, the Home Office or benefits helplines, but as the synopsis suggests, you’ll find similar systems operating throughout the EU.

The Sensemaker gently mocks the ridiculous hoops we’re expected to jump through just to get by in 21st century societies, and picks up on what can often feel like deliberate attempts to trip us up or put us off. After finding herself bored enough to start dancing along to the hold music, the woman is informed that she’s being recorded for training and improvement purposes. Later, she’s asked a series of probing, personal and entirely irrelevant questions, before being asked to demonstrate her drive and the soft skills she’s laid claim to without any clear indication of how she’s supposed to do so.

When the inevitable finally happens and the call is ended due to an error on the unnamed organisation’s part, she must choose whether to call back and go through the entire rigmarole again, or decide it isn’t worth the hassle.

A hilariously, excruciatingly relatable look at the fears and frustrations of modern life."

Article about The Sensemaker and Drop the Gogo.

"Comme à leur habitude, Woman’s Move, créé en 2012 par Iona D’Annunzio, Elsa Couvreur et Margaux Monetti, nous offre des productions qui semblent légères au début mais qui nous font vite nous questionner sur l’influence de la société. Les membres de la troupe ont bien compris comment utiliser leurs corps pour faire passer un message tout en évitant le cliché du danseur trop abstrait et élitiste."

"La peur de l'autre dans une chorégraphie" with Elsa Couvreur, choreographer, at the program of Printemps Carougeois with "Even Raël would agree", presented by Gilles Soulhac.

Article about Even Raël Would Agree at Printemps Carougeois

"La pièce chorégraphique est assez mobile, tant par sa structure qui laisse une importante part à l'improvisation et à la participation du public que par l'espace (Halles de la Fonderie ou Place du Marché) sur lequel elle peut s'interpréter."

Article about Festival Electron 2014 citing Even Raël Would Agree     

Highlighted by us.

"'For me, however, the highlights were in the gaps between the hedonism: Elsa Couvreur's dance piece Even Raël Would Agree, equal parts flash mob and febrile ritual."

Article about Festival Electron 2014 citing Even Raël Would Agree     

'you might suddenly come across a troupe of contemporary dancers performing some kind of Thriller onspeedinspired flashmob performance entited “Even Rael would Agree”'

Article about Festival Electron 2014 citing Even Raël Would Agree     

Article about Festival Electron 2014 citing Even Raël Would Agree     

Article about the projet Hug Me Loëx