Dépaysement

A room – the proposed space of co-existence for the audience and performers. A simple enough idea when one realizes that the theater, as a physical space, has always functioned in reference to something outside ourselves that also resonates inside us at the same time. A note, a word, a movement, a shaft of light – all have the potential to provoke a shift in the audience, a shift that can lead into other worlds, worlds knocking at the other side of the door.

The newly-founded RopisCo is configured like a workshop where music, theater and dance can creatively co-exist. This work – "Dépaysement" (“displacement”) – brings in a narrator, two dancers and three musicians. But it also brings audiences in close too, since their inviolate spaces, both private and personal, are placed quite literally center stage. Words accompany the movement, and the stage action borders closely on the audience, both to dissolve boundaries between the here and there, and to plunge the audience into the transience of the now unfolding before them.

From the Gesamtkunstwerk (“total work of art”) to hybrid modernist forms, innovation in the arts has always been fueled by collaborations that question established limits. Following in the footsteps of such historic meetings of minds, RopisCo are attempting to bring together theatre, music and dance. Their aim, if not to achieve some new form of artistic fusion, is to at least offer audiences something more than the sum of their parts.

How to define “dépaysement”? In English, “displacement” comes close to capturing the meaning of this quite specific term, which refers to the feeling someone might feel when faced with a shift in habit or a change of environment. It often refers to feelings associated with an immersion into an unfamiliar environment, one different from before. A sense of “dépaysement” can occur during a person’s transition from one period of their lives into another.

In 1958, Gaston Bachelard writes in his "Poetics of Space": “…thanks to the house, a great many of our memories are housed, and if the house is a bit elaborate, if it has a cellar and a garret, nooks and corridors, our memories have refuges that are all the more clearly delineated. All our lives we come back to them in our daydreams. […] At times we think we know ourselves in time, when all we know is a sequence of fixations in the spaces of the being’s stability[.]” (Translated by Maria Jolas – Boston: Beacon Press, 1969)