The supermarket is a space you can supposedly enter as you wish and stay for as long as it is open. You may feel as free there as in public spaces, its advertisement focuses on the fact that the supermarket is on your side but people who go into a supermarket and don’t shop, who just look or hang out, are seen as suspicious. Is everything alright? Is that person possibly a stalker or a thief?

The supermarket is a place we all visit regularly. It is an emblematic place of our time, ordinary and habitual. It is the place where modern gathering and harvesting happens, where offers meet desires – extremely normed, highly ordered and well lit.

Cécile Bally develops an analytic and movement-oriented way of looking at what happens in supermarkets. The supermarket now structures society in the way the Church used to do, with slogans indicating notions of charity and empathy. As far as the eye can see, the supermarket is organized in a linear structure: rows and rows of products marked with small price tags in vertical and horizontal lines, parallel aisles of equal space. Most of the products are wrapped and packed in cuboid plastic. Even fruit and vegetables are heavily packaged. The neon lights are cold and harsh, there are no shadows. The supermarket is a place for everyone – and still it is a space that separates, because there is one for each social class. The Price Is Right hints at a dual and contradictory logic of a global standardization in consumerism and a growing social inequality at the same time. The surrounding of the supermarket becomes a playground for absurd patterns in movement and behavior. It evokes fundamental fears, makes fondest wishes come true and successfully placates us with illusions.

CÉCILE BALLY studied dance, context and choreography at HZT Berlin (UDK). She also holds a master degree in Economics and Management from France. Her artistic work combines both fields and questions with humour but always methodically, the place of rationality, magic, dream and knowledge in performance art. Her latest piece The Sleep of Reason premiered at Tanztage Berlin 2017.

cecilebally.com

[Source: play bill]

TFB Nr. 1258