Gilles Jobin: Text to Speech

There are plenty of good reasons to come to Tokyo when it comes to art. The arts scene, like so many other aspects of this city, is strong, independent and increasingly influential abroad. For the very same reason, there are more and more reasons for overseas artists to bring their work to Japan.

So for those who love dance, the opportunity to see a work from Gilles Jobin—one revealed to audiences in his native Switzerland as recently as March—is not to be missed.

Jobin was classically trained in ballet, but his works are among the most contemporary you could ask for. He is resident choreographer at the Théâtre Arsenic in Lausanne, a position which he has held for many years, while busily piling up international acclaim. On top of a respectable stack of awards, his work The Moebius Strip has had an award-winning documentary filmed about it, and the tours of his productions are very nearly constant.

Jobin has spent his career studying the body, movement, and space. And throughout his explorations he has been intuitively, or perhaps even systematically, tearing down assumptions about each of those main ideas. His work is by turns conceptual, physical, aesthetic and even political. The main attractions to Jobin's work are his increasing use of innovative media, and his refusal to stick to one style.

His breakthrough work, A+B=Z, was a meditation on the body in both stillness and movement which he called “the body as prison, the body as a living art object.” The piece was highly successful, and yet looking at the bulk of Jobin's work, it was a mere starting point. In The Moebius Strip he forced all movement into the flattened confines of a grid on the stage, allowing only geometry to define movement, and deconstructing any narrative temptations on the part of the audience. In Under Construction he tore into the very fabric of the stage itself, turning it into nothing more than a skin which the dancers could not only move upon, but beneath, breaking its sanctity. Then in Steak House, he recreated an apartment with the dancers as its dysfunctional tenants, reacting to its objects, space and each other until the relationships become so abstract that everything appears to be a part of the space, transforming it.

He is renowned for undermining one expectation after another, including a recent commission work for the Grand Théâtre de Genève which was closer, without being truly close, to classical ballet. But most recently, Jobin revealed a work which bridges one of the most unlikely gaps: speech. At least, in a manner of speaking.

The work does not venture near to the realm of drama or even narrative—at least not in a deliberate manner—but runs together words and stories in various languages, taken from the internet and broadcast to the stage by way of text-to-speech software, which speaks text documents in a computerized voice manipulated from the stage. This is coupled with a complex, and quite literally “wired” set, interplayed images on several monitors, and of course the dancers occupying the space almost literally between words. The dance, too, seems a pastiche, moving through almost classical segments, ballroom, and Jobin's more signature low-to-the-ground work.

Text to Speech presents the computer as mediator for story, sound and image, creating a context for the dancer but also a kind of interruption. Certainly, both speech and text have become daily backdrops to our lives, and at times (consider the nagging psychological need to respond to text-messages) jump insistently to the foreground. It may not be the first dance work to bring in a vocal or text aspect, but the sheer richness and complexity of images, words, sound, movement, and the shifting of unexpected contexts throughout the project promise to make it the choreographer's most ambitious work to date.
Text to Speech (Jul. 25–26) Spiral Hall. Omotesando Metro Station. ¥4,300. Fri. 7:30 p.m., Sat. 2 p.m. 03-3498-1171. http://www.spiral.co.jp

Head Turners of British Art

It has been best known for giving generous prizes to artists for suspending cows in formaldehyde, using elephant dung in paintings, and simply flipping off the lights. But the Turner Prize has come a long way in its 24-year journey, and has cast its attention-grabbing net far beyond elite art circles to snare headlines in newspapers and even tabloids over its controversial winners. This is mostly for the better, but sometimes for the worse.

The see-saw of Turner Prize criticism goes from being overly elitist to overly popularist and back again on a regular basis. Even prize-winner Anish Kapoor once referred to the competition as “a bit of crap.” But the award—and the media surrounding it—has not only done a great deal to make the public care about contemporary art and bring them into the galleries, it has helped shape the character of British contemporary art.

Thus, if you're looking for an escape from the encroaching heat rather than into it, you have until July 13 to head into the Mori Art Museum as they host “History in the Making: A Retrospective of the Turner Prize.” This show ran its course at London's Tate Gallery until January of this year, and has now made its way to Tokyo. It includes works by every winner of the prize since its inception in 1984.

The show runs in a vaguely chronological manner, opening conservatively with an introduction to the award's namesake, J.M.W. Turner. But turn the corner, and you are soon faced with the ominous Terris Novalis, two enormous and somewhat atypical sculptures by Tony Cragg, and the real nature of the Turner Prize begins to appear.

The truth is that this exhibition is more of a “best of” than a retrospective, since only the winners are on parade. There is nothing of the many short-listed artists that enlivened the debate and gave the winners a run for their prize money. However, on the plus side, the pared-down approach leaves plenty of room to view each work in a nice, wide breathing space.

One of the Prize's most infamous works is Damien Hirst's Mother and Child, Divided—the now-infamous sculpture involving a cow and calf, each bisected and suspended in formaldehyde. For reasons unknown, the museum has forbidden visitors to walk through the center of the work—an aspect that I always understood to be integral to it. But the piece still gives rise to a symphony of squeals and gasps from unsuspecting punters.

If you have a beef with Hirst's cows, Martin Creed's Lights Going On and Off, which consists of an empty room with the lights turning on and off at five-second intervals, is one of the award's too-clever-by-half works. Creed plays with viewers expectations of space and objects in his work. And amusingly, any number of museum patrons will walk right through the installation, only to stop with surprise as the lights turn off (or on) mid-stride. Naturally that isn?t the point, but it?s definitely an amusing side-effect.

But there are plenty of more formal sculptures, paintings and video works, including Anish Kapoor's mesmerizing sculpture Void No. 3, and Gillian Wearing's film-portrait Sixty Minute Silence. Conspicuously absent from the Tokyo incarnation of the show is Simon Starling's much-discussed Shedboatshed—a boathouse he turned into a boat, sailed up a river, and then converted back again. But in its stead, we get One Ton II, a photographic work taking up less floor space, but with as much, if not more, conceptual impact.

These are the rock stars of contemporary art: some grateful, some reluctant, many controversial, and all heavily discussed. Love them or hate them, this is the once chance you get to see them all in the same place.

History in the Making: A Retrospective of the Turner Prize (to Jun. 13) Mori Art Museum. Roppongi Metro Station. ¥1,200. 10 a.m.–10 p.m. (Tue. until 5 p.m.) Tel. 03-5777-8600. www.mori.art.museum