Up, up and away

REFLECT ON THIS D'Imobilite performs his solo.

Photograph: Gabriele Orlandi

For dancers, out-of-body experiences are more or less an everyday occurrence. Take, for instance, the notion of projection—imagining a step a fraction of a second before it’s executed. As the choreographer Foofwa d’Imobilité explains, “It’s a little bit like the athlete who is going to do the high jump and sees himself doing the jump before it actually happens. In dance, there is also the judging of oneself, or seeing oneself through the eyes of a choreographer, a teacher or a mirror—constantly rechecking how the body looks from an outside eye.” And sometimes that outside eye is a dancer’s own.

D’Imobilité, 39, returns to New York this weekend with the evening-length Benjamin de Bouillis, a solo inspired by Swiss neurologist Olaf Blanke, whose work explores the theory of décorporation, or the sensation of perceiving the body from a variety of distant points. D’Imobilité, a dancer and choreographer based in Geneva who was a revered member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company for seven years, created the work as part of a commission from Switzerland’s Science et Cité Festival. “Basically, it pairs an artist with a scientific person,” he says in a phone interview. “Somebody proposed to me this neurologist, and I knew that he was working on out-of-body phenomena. He wasn’t instrumental, like a real collaborator would be, giving a lot of input or dialogue about how to create the piece. It’s more that I was inspired by his work and decided to base my solo on his findings.” D’Imobilité did team up with frequent collaborator Antoine Lengo, who created a sound score that incorporates music and text.

In Benjamin de Bouillis, a copresentation of the Baryshnikov Arts Center and Chez Bushwick, the choreographer uses only a portable mirror and his body to illustrate Blanke’s theories, which encompass three types of cases: when you see yourself as a double but remain the subject; when you fly out of your body and see yourself as the object; and, finally—and this is the most bizarre—when you see yourself in multiple forms. “I think the whole solo is a list of exemplifications,” D’Imobilité says. “It has an order, yet I did want a theater experience, not something didactic or scientific or highly technological. I’m not presenting projections of myself here and there.”

In previous works, D’Imobilité has objectified his body through text and outlandish costumes. Benjamin de Bouillis (the title is taken from a line in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake) plays with the idea of a self-portrait. The mirror has a frame; when D’Imobilité is shown inside of it, the image resembles a painting.

“It also reflects the audience, which can see itself in the mirror,” he says. “I play a lot with different ways of facing the audience.” In a basic sense, the viewer experiences the first instance of Blanke’s theory this way (seeing a double of yourself). But part of the charm is that there are few tricks in this piece; Benjamin de Bouillis relies on D’Imobilité’s skill as a performer. “I use pantomime as a way to appear as another self,” he explains. “It’s a very old form but effective, and I thought that bringing it out for this piece—like an old friend—was a good idea. It also allows for a comic and dramatic side.”

The humor comes out of an odd place, given the subject matter. While Blanke didn’t participate in the creation of Benjamin de Bouillis, he did share case studies with D’Imobilité. “While they are terrifying—almost like something out of Edgar Allan Poe—the stories are also terribly funny because they’re so absurd,” D’Imobilité says. “I want to have both coexist—so people can laugh, but also have some kind of dramatic experience through theater, mime and dance.”

The choreographer has firsthand experience with the concept of doubling; he changed his name from Frédéric Gafner to Foofwa D’Imobilité (which everyone now calls him, except for his parents) as a serious joke. “I really liked the idea of deciding what I would be called and designing something that would reflect my personality,” he explains. “That’s the serious part. The fun part is to think that it’s just an indicator, it’s just a label—you are not your name even though it sticks to you. A fellow dancer suggested Foofwa. I like the stupid, noble particle—the D’—and the fou inside the Foofwa because of it being positively crazy. It’s ironic and it puzzles people and hopefully makes them smile. I thought, More smiles in the world? Why not?”

Foofwa d’Imobilité is at the Baryshnikov Arts Center Thu 26–Sat 28.