Reservations: http://www.culturgest.pt
On Friday 13 and Saturday 14 May, If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution is presenting the restaging of the play, Five Sisters (1982), by Guy de Cointet at Culturgest in Lisbon. The play is presented as part of a retrospective of the artist’s work, Guy de Cointet: Who Wrote That? which is on display from 20 February to 15 May 2016.
The premise of Five Sisters is simple: four sisters meet each other in their parent’s home and wait for the fifth sister to arrive. They talk about their lives, doctors, diets, work and holidays. Meanwhile, the California sun mysteriously provokes their reactions, emotions and moods.
Five Sisters is the last performance that was staged during the French-born artist Guy de Cointet’s lifetime, across of which from the late 1960s until his untimely death in 1983 he was an influential member of the Los Angeles art scene. De Cointet’s performances are surreal sceneries in which ordinary, daily events are linked to specific objects, colours and letters – often in a lucid way. Five Sisters marks a departure from de Cointet’s earlier work in its attention to light as the main catalyst of emotion. On Five Sisters, Guy de Cointet collaborated with the sculptor Eric Orr who created the lighting, set design and part of the sound, and with the musician Joseph Hammer. In the new production, the light and sound plan is reconstructed by Elizabeth Orr. The performers are Violeta Sanchez, Einat Tuchman, Adva Zakai, and Veridiana Zurita and their costumes are by Dutch designer Monique van Heist.
The restaging of Five Sisters is the result of research conducted by art historian Marie de Brugerolle as part of If I Can’t Dance’s programme Performance in Residence. The current rendition of the play addresses questions around the idea of ‘making Five Sisters anew’, and departs from earlier restagings of de Cointet’s plays that focused on reconstruction. To date the restaging of Five Sister has toured extensively in Europe, the United States, and China.
Book deal
The restaging of the Five Sisters is complemented by a publication that concentrates on these questions of making the play anew, and includes contributions by Marie de Brugerolle, Snejanka Mihaylova, Elizabeth Orr, an excerpt from the original script and an annotated interview by Vivian Ziherl with performers Violeta Sanchez, Einat Tuchman, Adva Zakai, and Veridiana Zurita. This book is designed by Will Holder.
To celebrate the tour of Five Sisters to Lisbon, the book is available for purchase online from If I Can’t Dance for €15,– (plus postage and handling) and includes a complete set of published ‘In Conversation’ with all of the Performance in Residence research commissions of Edition IV – Affect (2011-2012): Marie de Brugerolle on Guy de Cointet, Bulegoa z/b on Isidoro Valcárcel Medina, Vanessa Desclaux on Matt Mullican, and Inti Guerrero on Flávio de Carvalho. This offer will be available until the end of May 2016, and orders can be made via shop@ificantdance.org
The restaging of Five Sisters is a Performance in Residence commission by If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution and is a collaborative initiative of If I Can’t Dance (Amsterdam), MUSAC (Léon), and STUK Kunstencentrum (Leuven). The restaging of Five Sisters is financially supported by the municipality of Amsterdam, the Amsterdam Fund for the Arts, the Estate of Guy de Cointet, Étant Donnés, and the Mondriaan Fund. Five Sisters is coproduced by If I Can’t Dance (Amsterdam), Kunsthalle Dusseldorf (Dusseldorf), LACMA (Los Angeles), MoMA (New York), MUSAC (Léon), Pompidou Metz, Reina Sofia (Madrid), STUK Kunstencentrum (Leuven) and OCT Contemporary Art Terminal Shenzhen. Special thanks to Yael Davids, Dora Garcia and the Estate of Eric Orr.