Witness

At a time when revivals are flourishing, exploring and reflecting on different areas of the history of dance, Mark Tompkins’s HOMMAGES,  created between 1989 and 1999, offers a different view of some of the  key figures. This view is not so much historic and reflexive as intense  and joyfully offbeat. What does Mark Tompkins’s body make of these  spectres, known to us today mainly through photographs, films and  fragments of images? How does he bring the imaginary and these iconic  figures together? Valeska Gert, Joséphine Baker and Vaslav Nijinski, as  well as Harry Sheppard, a black American dancer who was Mark Tompkins’  mentor: they are above all unique bodies which, through the power of  their embodiment, precludes any type of reproduction. To evoke them is  to expose oneself to the risk of deviation, approximation, and  sacrilege. But exposing oneself is the point of these portraits, where a  self-portrait of the dancer as a being embodied emerges. Without  seeking to avoid the inferior copy, kitsch, subterfuge, revealing  clichés and mythologies, Mark Tompkins reveals a gap that is both a  fantasy and a principle of truth. Using all the artifices of cabaret, of  disguise, of song, of music, he passes from one body to the other – man  or woman, white or black – moved by the pleasure of acting as if:  of singing with Joséphine Baker, of making faces with Valeska Gert, of  leaping with Nijinsky. As well as being accompanied by these figures, he  accompanies us towards them, allowing us to enjoy for a moment this  little hole in time.

Source: program of the CND