DANCERS IN THE MOONLIGHT

                    “He was soaking wet, […] he was […] cold and he was fifty thousand light years         

                     from home."

[…] The gravity, double of what he was used to, made every move an exhausting agony.

Yet after tens of thousands of years this corner of the war hadn’t changed.[…] Just like this fucking planet of a star he never heard before he was stationed there. And now it was sacred ground because the enemy had arrived too. The enemy, the only other intelligent race in the Galaxy… cruel, loathsome, disgusting monsters.

First contact had happened close to the center of the Galaxy, after the long and difficult colonization of a few thousand planets; and it was war, immediately; […] And now, planet by planet, they had to fight tooth and nail, […] The enemies tried to infiltrate and every outpost was crucial.

He kept on guard, […] fifty thousand light years from his country, to fight on a strange world and asking himself whether he’ll ever make back alive. And then he saw one of them creeping toward him […] its noise and looks […] made him shiver. Many, with time, got used to them and were desensitized; not him. They were creatures too disgusting, with two arms and two legs only, that nauseatingly pale skin and no scales.

(From Fredric Brown’s story “Sentinel”, 1973)

Dance, female dancers, a world thought rosy, sweet and cozy in the collective imagination, can become a claustrophobic battlefield where the actress themselves look aliens before the disquieting figure shadowing Brown’s Sentinel. This photographic series and its accompanying video might be the “other” answer to the “en pointe world”; a space trip of sort in which bodies lose their worn roles to appear under a new light made, to be honest, more of shadows than lights…

These shots contain the interaction of three characters: two dancers and a mysterious “watcher/fighter” of martial appearance, who becomes the real protagonist. The black and white, like beginning and end, mix and fight while dancing while the main actor, blacker than the dancers, never mixes.

Dance is an art just like war, of which our protagonist is master and owner. Like Brown’s sentinel he is the voice of a furious design locked in a fight with an especially disgusting race: humans. In this surreal environment time is still in an undefined past, without markers or precise references.

The two dancers, in our case far from being disgusting, are queens and slaves of the protagonist, the black figure watching them and interacting from a side. He is a sort of watcher, a slave himself to the moves of the dancers, who are caught in private moments and duets that excluding him turn them in his preys… His pulsions make them move and dance, act, die or fly for him, far from his martial presence… In their rigor and repetitivity they are opposite yet close creatures, depending on his looking while he is free. He doesn’t need their eyes, he has no need to feed his narcissism.

We can’t know what he is… He takes part in the dancers’ games but doesn’t really need to.

He is a sinister figure, maybe a demon or vanity itself; they feed on him and degrade until they don symbols of submission, playing his game.

In the end he wins the battle, smite his preys until he becomes indispensable. He is the only one managing to be free, unfettered by anyone. Only a Martian could. Not us humans…

Chiara Messori