I shall soon be quite dead at last in spite of all
Premiered February 24 - 100 Grad Festival, Sophiensaele, Berlin
Performed March 15 & 16 - Nah Dran Series at ADA-Studio, Berlin
Conceived & Choreographed by Patrick Faurot
Performed by Patrick Faurot, David Necchi, and Luc Reboullet
Music by Space Traveler, Captain Beefheart & Moondog
"I shall soon be quite dead at last in spite of all" is essentially concerned with compulsion and obsession and the experience of living as a process of dying inspired by Samuel Beckett's novel Malone Dies.
Somehow we are not in control, neither of our actions nor our thoughts. In the piece, the individual is reduced to an action-machine or a word-machine. Malone lies in bed with an impotent body; simultaneously his mind compulsively produces words and images. Alternatively, the hero of his fantasy, Sapho, rolls compulsively in an infinite circle, a compulsive body with an impotent mind.
"Dish and pot, dish and pot, these are the poles." Living, in Malone Dies, is reduced to actions. All of our daily and personal concerns are reducible to the actions of eating and shitting, of waking and sleeping, copulation, the passage of time, cycles. In essence, living is the long action of dying. The choreography of "...quite dead at last..." manifests this reduction in a series of choreographic and mechanical repetitions. It is a constant circling, an infinite fall, the spastic exertion of a body that arrives nowhere.