Pauline Payen
–
Yahoo! Dance! #2 : The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions.
Yahoo! Dance! comes from a singular practice which involves taking headlines from Yahoo!News, an internet news feed, and using them as inspiration for eccentric dances, fake robots and bizarre conversations. The style mixes camp with contemporary dance, voice work, and computer-generated sounds. It is flirting with both the deadly serious and the slapstick.
Through a practice derived from Jeanine Durning’s “non-stopping”, I have been researching connections between automatic generation of movement and voice material, and the constant computer-generated headlines we are subjected to daily. What kind of impact does the news feed have on our bodies and psyche? If you are not able to take a distance, how long can you still laugh about it? In today’s attention economy, where clicks are currency, many of us feel trapped in a cycle of desire and annoyance. I want to see if we can regain agency in this ocean of lures. Can I use the Yahoo News archive as a social mirror and be a subject in the midst of my own subjection?