Show Gone

They turn the lights up. Then they turn the lights out. The snap changes everything. Again and again a new world appears, fit for their back-and-forth of confession and revelation. The show happens in a rubato strobe, an anti-social-media scroll session that exposes the desire and the impossibility of controlling the narrative.

To do theory means to think in response to the visible world, to form a pattern from information. And the basic unit of information that these theorists see everywhere is the ending. They know so much has already ended: lives and ways of life; bodies, politics, and, most of all, the certainty that there will always be another chance. Yet somehow the information keeps coming.

It wasn’t what they’d intended. Eight years worth of endings had elapsed since they’d been together. A long time in choreographer years, longer than they’d ever been apart. The fact gave rise to two questions: "What do we need to know in order to cross the bridge to each other? And what do we need to forget so that we can begin?” The double-question became their starting point. The two choreographers answer with a calculated loss of the plot.

Show Gone is a cinema of sentences. Instead of still images shown fast enough to give the illusion of life, it presents life-story fragments at human speed. From its endless endings gradually emerges the feeling of a beginning.