In “WEG” Argentinian choreographer Ayelen Parolin instantiates a kaleidoscopic landscape of shape­shifting identities. Seven dancers, accompanied by pianist Lea Petra, navigate eclectic pathways, shaking through multiple movement repertoires while seeking the undercover animal in the human. Drawing from physicist Pierre C. Dauby’s research on dynamic systems, Parolin creates a tumultuous polyphony in which uncontrollable tremors take hold of the dancers and instability is met with extravagance.

Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, choreographer Ayelen Parolin lives and works in Brussels. A laureate of the Pépinières Européennes for Young Artists Programme, she performed for Mathilde Monnier and Alexandra Bachzetsis, among others, before creating her own works. In 2015 she presented the autobiographical, ever-evolving solo, “25.06.76”, titled after her date of birth, in New York. Since then, her choreographic interests extend into questions of femininity, animalism and the deconstruction of the male figure. Her piece “Heretics”, featuring pianist Lea Petra, was selected for Aerowaves in 2015 and in 2016 she was awarded the Fellowship by the Pina Bausch foundation and the SACD choreography award. She has been commissioned by leading dance companies worldwide and is currently artist in residence at the Théâtre de Liège.
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The artist is meant to seek into the unknown, to try and derive meaning from it. I conHow does one make a group? How does one exist in the plural without erasing the singular? How are black and white to be mixed without arriving at grey? These are some of the questions that served as a point of departure for the creation of “WEG”, whose central challenge was “the composition of chaos out of nine individualities,” says Ayelen Parolin, “to draw a ‘landscape’: a complex harmony /disharmony. […] Before I began working on the piece, I met with physicist Pierre C. Dauby from the University of Liège, who guided and accompanied me toward an understanding of chaos theory. I was fascinated by the invisible links that exist in nature, how everything is interconnected… I also knew that I wanted to trace these paths, these individual paths, which intersect and coincide almost imperceptibly; to create an unstable balance, a tension between individual singularity and common abstraction.”

The desire to play with unstable equilibria, to juggle opposites, contradictions, is one of the great recurrences in Parolin’s writing. Not as a result of her taste for contradiction, but for what it reveals us to be: always more complex than we would like to believe. “What I find beautiful and what attracts me to people are all their flaws, their imperfections, their illogicalities, their incongruities. This is the material I want to work with, and what my starting point has always been: not smoothing things out; rather, on the contrary, emphasising the roughness, the bumps, the holes…” Accepting complexity. Rejecting cleavages, making them collide. There is an eminently queer state of mind in this approach, even if she doesn’t proclaim it and even if, formally, aesthetically, this qualifier is not the one we would impulsively bestow upon her at first glance.
The complete portrait of Ayelen Parolin, “Tracing beautiful flaws”, by Olivier Hespel was published as part of Magazin im August 2020 and can be found online in English at www.tanzimaugust.de/magazin.

[Source: play bill]

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