Those who hadn’t lost their sense of direction ended up at Mediamatic around 21:00 hrs for The End must go on. The End must go on was the conclusion of Density +-0, a series of dance performances carried out at indoor and outdoor locations throughout Amsterdam. Density +-0 is the contribution of Violet Bureau to the art manifestation My Name is Spinoza. It takes as a starting point Gilles Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza’s ideas about the body’s relation to its surrounding space. For Deleuze, the body is defined only by a longitude and a latitude.
Four dancers worked together with electronic musician Felix Kubin. A long list of possible endings was written on one of the many blackboards in the Mediamatic space, set up to seduce visitors to publicly respond to ethical dilemmas. The end of desire, the end of a wave, or the end of a carousel ride…
The dancers chose a new ending every time, in an attempt to approximate the perfect ending, or the real ending, or the end of all ends. A 5-minute brainstorm proved enough to put together a small choreography, with the help of clothes, props and the samples of Felix Kubin. This way, they illustrated ‘the end of a long journey’, ‘the end of battery’, ‘the end of doubt’ and ‘the end of Dalai Lama’ and many more ends.
The dancers were constantly thinking out loud about their vision of the appropriate ending; one that would neither be too dramatic, nor too funny. While an end is usually understood as something final, the performance resulted in a whole cycle of endings that eventually led to a big compilation of everything mashed together.
But even after the apocalyptic climax there was more. Three dancers excavated the fourth who had buried himself like a fossil under the plastic sheet on the floor. It was the portrayal of ‘the end of history’, and a beautiful coda to the series of endings already performed. The dancers uncovered ancient history, only to lay bare that the search for the end continues…
A short clip of the dancers performing "The End of Battery"
