New texts on dance: "A Little More Than Nothing"

Christos Mouchas’ “A Little More Than Nothing” is an interactive experiment, an experiential experience rooted in the live coming-into-being of human co-existence, and of social groups.

Each member of the audience enters the space alone, and each person decides how long to spend with the performance, up to a maximum of three hours. Inside the black box, seven spectators and one performer are sat so that their roles are not clear. It is quite reasonable, therefore, to wonder who is the spectator and who the performer.

Taking only human interaction in its most basic form as his medium, before verbal communication enters into play, Christos Mouchas welcomes the audience in alone – eight people in total at a time – without any ready performative materials beyond the simple presence of those inside the space. It’s as if he’s posing the question: “We’re here. What now?” And this, as a starting point, opens up a field of co-existence, a space which – in the absence of some performative product, and whose sole material is our own unmediated presence – reveals both the fundamental desire and juvenile need of humankind to gather together, and the perception of self through the other. “A Little More Than Nothing” proved itself in the end to be a quite “transparent” experiment – without some secret agenda or aim – interested only in how, when human beings are freed from or denied speech, role, status and limits, all they are left with is the immediacy of stimuli, the body in and of itself, spatiality, the gaze, and a feeding-back into their most primordial form. And it is perhaps through just such a simplification that the majesty of human complexity can best be illuminated. This work, then, by Christos Mouchas is certainly “something more than nothing”, without finite limits as to its content, sense, or structure, and without that strict, stereotypical division between audience and performer.