amilton de azevedo writes about ALTERMUNDI, by Project Alterdogs (Canada), presented in the 2024 OFFTA Live Art Festival (Tiohtià:ké/Montreal). this text is part of a special coverage; the critic traveled to Canada at the invitation of the Festival TransAmériques (FTA).
These fragmented notes are about the experience of witnessing a fragment of a performance. ALTERMUNDI is four hours long; I’ve watched it for two and a half hours.
Two beings come into existence. Somewhat Matrix, somewhat aliens, somewhat naives. Project Alterdog’s ALTERMUNDI starts from scratch and Léonie Bélanger and Claire Pearl are like extraterrestrials that had just arrived. Or like children.
To experience existence for the first time. To be amazed by the body and the movements and the light and the park and the oneness and the otherness. Two avatars inhabiting somewhere. Or somewheres
Sci-fi meets videogaming meets humour. Aliens, non-playable characters (NPCs), clowns. At many moments there is this joyful game of leader and follower, clumsy and authoritarian, just like a pair of clowns, with the same sense of discovery that the masks evoke. Curiosity, attention.
The movement quality. Bélanger and Pearl are there, present, listening to themselves, to one another, to the dense soundscape by Arthur Champagne and the company of other world builders, as the figuration listed: Camille Courchesne Couturier, Béatrice Cardinal, Orléanne Revel, Jacynthe Desjardins and Fanny Bélanger-Poulin.
It is quite radical to realize the difference in their beings; the two performers and the ones who reshape that avatars. Universes kind of collide as everything is structured within different rules of being, as in speed and precision within the gestures and expressions, but also the shock between the costumes, a kind of neutral space suit designed by Pénélope Dulude-de Broin meets daily clothing. And so the props are even more strange to see.
They are newcomers, newbies, babies going tactile, discovering what it can be to wear a belt, a fencing helmet, what could such objects provide them regarding action and affections. At the same time, it is like starting a new adventure with the inventory full: everything materializes in front of or even already on them.
Champagne’s track goes “let’s go” repeatedly while Bélanger waves generically towards “audiences”. Shit, I feel like I am watching one of those TikTok lives with people pretending to be NPCs – no shade.
ALTERMUNDI is the real-world version of watching a livestream of a world building game. Actually, no. Because within their real-time composing, fulfilled with presence, they are artificial NPCs. They just respond to what is provoked – in videogames, this sometimes is the reason for many memes about glitching or repetition (yeah, mate, of course you took a f* arrow in your knee). Here repetition is composition. One might not quite catch what is the world they are living at that moment, but for sure that is something going on that is not precisely from here.
It is like an open-world videogame where there is no main quest and we are seeing all the random side quests being played by NPCs (I mean this as a positive aspect, I don’t know if it sounds like but is a compliment).
I realize this text has a lot of comments of my own going directly towards the reader. I guess it has something to do with how I’ve watched ALTERMUNDI, continuously talking with myself and commenting on my own experience. Also overhearing people that kept talking around me and replying their topics in my head. That’s a kind of world building also? Nah, I don’t think so. Back to the performance.
The pause kind of breaks the flow. But it also helps to keep focused; not only the on-the-edge performers but also the audience. I guess it is normal within durational performances for one watching to zone out – there was this awesome moment where two birds were fighting for food and a third one came and, yes, outdoor performances, you know, there is always a lot going on.
Racing track. Western village (can’t say I didn’t thought about HBO’s Westworld in some way – ok, I just saw the first season but damn it is so awesome). Futuristic desert. The imaginary landscapes described in the performance’s synopsis are somewhat outlines for what it is to become. Champagne was shifting props on his table, maybe to signalize what his soundscape was proposing?
As an outdoor durational performance, of course that being on the same page – performers, musician, world builders – is quite important. For those who see, it doesn’t matter so much: what is this going on while I was just passing by? Oh, one person is running holding a bike’s handlebar, let me stick around to see where this goes. The other one is wearing a hoodie with horns? Yeah I don’t get it, I’ll totally stick around. Boom, you were there for over an hour and did not realize it.
Then, suddenly, emotions. Their glaze upon the beginning was of another order, another planet, another something. Robots, clones, data-receiving androids. Trance, ritual, tech. It all goes together as there is everything to be built in ALTERMUNDI.
There is bliss, there is despair. There is joy, there is sorrow. There is the unknown, there is all to be seen.
Things need to die in order for others to be born. World building is world destroying. Come to be, fall apart. Come to be, fall apart.
We are all eager for narratives (I wrote this same sentence for my critic about Tamara Cubas’ Multitud, sorry, but, you know, human inherent characteristics and works that deal with composition and movement). And so when we contemplate those avatars creating their own meanings through the use of recognizable props and clothes, we keep trying to figure it out. There is nothing to figure it out, there is everything to figure it out.
There is no world left to be built but there are so many worlds yet to be built. Yes. I am finishing this not-so-organized text with the Parable of the trickster, by Octavia Butler: “There’s nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns”. May they burn, lighting up the possibilities of ALTERMUNDIs within our own.
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