credits:
Choreography: Malgven Gerbes und David Brandstätter
Video: Julien Crépieux
Sound/music: Christoph Engelke
Coproduction: s-h-i-f-t-s und fabrik Potsdam the frame of Tanzplan Potsdam: Artists-in-residence Session House Tokyo artists-in-residence, the Korean National University of Arts, tanzfabrik Berlin,

With support from: Bezirksamt Tempelhof Schöneberg Berlin, Institut Francais Seoul

Herbstleuchten Festival at Fabrik Potsdam, The Arts at Dartington, DANCE 2010 Munich
Works in process Performed at: Schöneberger Tanznacht (title: Bewegung hat kein Ende), Ikonoklaste Festival Wuppertal (title: Where is Jim?), Tanzfabrik Berlin, Fabrik Potsdam.

Notebook will be performed at:
Les Hivernales d‘Avignon 2012

Text by David Williams about "notebook"
Inevitably I think of calligraphy, Zen gardens, and the (di)stilling of the ego to a deep- breathing economy of form. I think of the term ‘ma’ in Japanese aesthetics: the ‘empty’ space in a bowl that is the ground for form’s appearance; the depth in an ink-wash painting; the silence in music; the active space of potentiality between things. According to ‘ma’, emptiness is active and full to overflowing.
I think of Freud’s Wunderblock, in English often called the ‘mystic writing pad’, the surface for memory’s inscriptions and erasures, the notebook for the work of consciousness.
And I think of William Blake: ‘To see a world in a grain of sand ...’
In Julien Crépieux’s video images, his camera another notebook of mnemonic inscriptions, other lines are traced in light. As dusk falls over London and the contrails of planes dissolve in the night sky, in my mind’s eye I remember and see again the trajectory of a tiny old dog, and the passage of a small inquisitive child; the flex of tree trunks in a forest in the wind; a ship skirting the coast of a Japanese island; the choreography of litter in the Seoul traffic.
The memory of movement.
If I think back to when I first spent time in a studio with Malgven, two things struck me. First, her energized drawings in her notebook – usually architectural configurations, spaces materializing on the empty page before your eyes. A new page, a new drawing. She used paper so freely, I once suggested to her that she was hungry for space. Secondly, her remarkably patient attention to detail in moving, the economy and clarity of her impulses, the dynamism of her stillness. Her embodied lightness reminded me of a phrase Paul Valéry once wrote, about being ‘light as a bird, not light as a feather’. On paper and on the dance floor, she inscribed space with self-sufficiency and the lightest of touch; images appeared, and then dispersed. Erasure as release, return to potentiality.
If I think back to when I first spent time in a studio with David, he seemed to be a horse to Malgven’s bird. A more animal presence, an unpredictable energy flaring like magma. Watching, smiling, prowling, jumping. He struck me as extraordinarily sensitive, a live wire - and what animal behaviourists call a ‘lean-into’ creature, yes, like a horse: tactile, relational, capable of great generosity and stillness. At first it registers rectilinear spaces, there and not there, shadow traces of remembered or possible architectures established for Malgven’s embodied inscriptions - and then wiped away with the lightest of touch.
After a while, in my mind at least, the rice becomes something more complex and elemental like weather: rain drops, snow, wind, then waves unfolding across a shore with a hiss. Only the barest of means are employed: two people, a broom, the floor as scriptable surface, the rice – a homogeneous singularity and a granular multiplicity. The rice is both wave and particle, like light.
Attention is amplified. Stillness moves.

The movement of memory.

David Williams

London, August 2010

Reviews:
(translated from the german original)

Munich, 29.10.2010
Movement calligraphy next to channels of rice
David Brandstätter and Malgven Gerbes show „notebook“ at DANCE 20110

It makes you come to ease, this performance of „notebook“ at DANCE in Schwere Reiter. One is allowed to concentrate respectively on one thing, and then the next: watching, listening, sensing, appreciating. Something, we are usually not doing consciously or even continuously during our daily routine. Who is then asking himself how a hair sounds, detaching from the scalp? Or if the memory of a sound is the sound of memory? In our technological affluent society multitasking is the predominant trademark of a culture, that has made it its duty to always remember and master multiple tasks at once.  The choreographer David Brandstätter however is moving with a big broom a pile of rice grains over the black dance floor, creating accurate lines, angles and corners.  An alternative draft, if one wanted to put it that way. Spaces arise, Borders, and passages, channels and tracks, a zen garden. The associations remain at the spectator. Scarcely Brandstätter and his partner, the architect and choreographer Malgven Gerbes activate those free spaces emerged, by filling the gaps with meaning through performed actions and gestures. As integrated as possible they enroll the performative function of this performance and jostle their spectator into an order of perception of the undefiled outlook.
In a huge moment in the second half of the performance, this interest find its symbolization. Gerbes is sitting, back to the audience, in front of the back wall and watches, as the spectators do, the images projected in big size, that Julien Crepieux has recorded in Asia, edited in unsteady rhythm, and sounds added to: a silent road, whereon a little dog is lumbering. An ocean of waving tree tops. A biker coming towards.  A lake. Gerbes becomes part of thees images and is what she is. A sitting woman, whose picture in the image is shortly awakening the illusion of a time lapse. Two month she and David Brandstätter have travelled through South Korea and Japan, accompanied by the visual artist Julien Crepieux and the sound designer Christoph Engelke.
Altogether they have spent a year there, during the last years. They have investigated different smells sounds, tunes, people, in short many different new cultures. There they have become collectors, of geustures, movements, things and activities that they then translated into their own culture of movement, without reworking or alienating them.
They wanted to find out, as they mention in their comprehensive accompanying documentation, how and through what, culture is affecting us and how is shapes our languages. Their performative concept they derived from the completely different understanding of perception, communication, void and fullness in the asian thinking, and the realized it consistently. That is marking the Zeitgeist of their not concluded Performance work that they themselves understand as work in process and that is finally trying to establish a term of Art uniquely on the perception of things.

On Stage they exchange roles. As calm as Brandstätter is moving his broom and later almost virtuously dashing on tracks of rice modeling a train passing through the landscape, Gerbes is fascinating in her solo parts as gesture and movement calligrapher, able to install in the spectators mind space a multiplicity of details from another world and to make them vanish for something new. That is the way everyone is crating in his and her phantasy ones personal „notebook“.
It was a fascinating and magnificent evening, that must have been understood by the Munich Public.

writer: Alexandra Karabelas Tanznetz

Munich 30.10.2010
The years of plenty have passed
interim result of DANCE 2010
(...)
A discovery is the sensible and intelligent work of Malgven Gerbes and David Brandstätter: with a giant broom Brandstätter is forming from a pile of rice in pacing ease bit by bit the ground plans of buildings. And in the emerging imaginative space Gerbes, from Brittany, is dancing her beautifully calm movements and presents us in Gestures and words a sense of „the sound of falling snowflake“-
about perceiving the almost imperceivable. Architecture, dance, city and rural landscapes projected on a big screen, sounds and tones are merging into a poetic walk on the borderline to the asian culture.

writer: Malve Gradinger / Münchner Merkur