Relational performance for 4 dancers. endless. 2017

Created by Gabriel Beck

Performer-collaborator : Nate Yaffe, Lauren Semeschuk, Melina Stinson and Simon Renaud

with the participation of Faye Mullen, Halbe Kuipers, Jorden David Doody, Marie Claude Beck, Anthony Cooper, and William Robinson , with the outside-eye of Victoria S. Stanton

With the support of Montreal Dance – Workshop residency & Concordia University Montreal

Pourparlers is performative’s role game critically reflecting the art society through four archetypes and power relations inherent to the art system and the conventional relation with the audience : the artist, the director, the judge and the audit are the roles activated here. Thought as an equation with variable producing constant uncertainties, Pourparlers shifts from the game to a live art-performance. Here everything is constantly negotiated: positions, agencies, hard and soft power matrixes of our society. Mirroring the society, It laying bare the mechanism of decision making and social forces. Time, space and roles are endless, the performance blurs the boundaries between art and real life.

wood box, clay, mirror

Performance with the artist and an actor. 1h30. 2016

Created and performed by Gabriel Beck with Brice Noeser

Thanks to Concordia University and the SenseLab 

Fragile equilibrium is a significant experience of the present. Discursive, this situation reveal and sustains the unstable equilibrium of forces’ relations existing around the object of the art’s experience. The starting point is clear: an educational meeting with a game made with mirror and clay. As the time goes on, the subject change to be the identification of who are the people and power relations involved in the space. The governance of experience is gradually giving way to itself.

Performance 1h, vidéo HD projected, sculpture concrete, bulb, néon roof ligh. 2015

Gallery (OU PRESQUE), Roubaix, France

Creation : Gabriel Beck

performance : Thibaud Le Maguer

Set assistant : Jan Loïc Moyer
Camera : Kevin Voinet, Faye Mullen

Film created with Roubaix’s inhabitants : Ines, Yamin, Christiane, Mohamed, Monique, Ionit, Luc,  Hamid, Aline, Kevin, Pauline and Faye.

Co-production : FPH Epeule/centre

To create a paradox between the concept of shelter and the light, 67 industrial ceilings lights are recycled as bricks to build an architecture in ruine. Beside, a neon bulb is planted in a concrete stele. Activated with local inhabitants guided by Gabriel beck these bright objects constitute an hybrid landscape, movie set, between ruin and technology, an environment of strange and subversive life.

Installation & Performative talk

Biennale d’Architecture de Bordeaux, 2014

With Dauphins Architecture, Geoffrey Crespel et Guillaume Ramillien and co.

A dozen architects and artists lived for ten days a military wasteland, by installing micro-situ with the aim to create an environment questioning even the definition of « inhabited ».

The accumulation of these micro-installations in line with the existing architecture, generated a singular use that had a direct impact on personal and social life of the participants of this experiment. Gabriel Beck built a 3000m2 functional toilet, Geoffrey Crespel made a hole in the concrete slab to create a discussion room etc.

Without showing the work site, restitution was held in the conference cycle of Biennale of AGORA architecture. By hijacking the format « conference » each of the participants developed a personal story to tell, rather than seek to illustrate an architectural project based on human experience it has generated.

3 performances in-situ, 1h each,

14th Venice architecture biennale – weekend special, 2014

Curator : Rem Koolhaas / AMO

Created and performed by Gabriel Beck

Dancer/Steadicamer : Valentin Monge

production manager : Achille Zoni

production : Rodo Tisnado

For the 14th edition of the Venice Architecture Biennale_ his curator Rem Koolhaas proposes to extend the Biennale 6 months to integrate theater, film and dance biennales. It creates Monditalia an exhibition in the Arsenale punctuated with 7 stages exploring many typologies of theatres spaces. Invited to make a proposal for a 10 days choreographic residency and 2 days of performance, Gabriel Beck created a performance taking place on all 7 stages. Questioning the relationship between architecture and its use in the specific context of this exhibition, he staged the cinematoraphic features but also the technical qualities and symbolic gesture of a steadicamer cameraman. Working the conditions of representation of space in video and playing with the accepted conventions of exhibit space, Gabriel Beck moves unspeakably visitors between different states of presence: extra of an imaginary film as much as spectator of a choreography which they themselves are the performers.

Installation video, 2 channel video on monitor HD 10mn, 2014

Creation by Gabriel Beck

Created with Thibaud le Maguer & Christophe Wavelet

steadicamer / dancer : Téva Vasseur

Cinema and choreography are articulated together to dialogue with architecture in a unique setting. First, a cinematic act, expressing the relation inbetween a body and an architecture. During a long sequence shot where only is expressed a subjective vision of a body in movement, this movie provokes the architecture by considering it unfit of protecting but convenient to the leakness and to the dizziness.

second, a study of bodies acting in space. What do we see in a cinema body at work, trained in the special technique of steadicam when it films architecture, when it is itself filmed? Here the steadicamer from the 1st movie is seen in turns as a body-machine, a ghostly presence, an organic presence, an imaginary power and a performer.

2013, co-production Studio National des Arts Contemporains du Fresnoy, Nuit Blanche Brussels, Mairie de Roubaix, Rodo Tisnado

wheel light (aluminium, polycarbonate, led), activated by dancers, vidéo 4K, 

created by Gabriel Beck

choreography : Louise Kalfon

Sound : Aymeric de Tapol & Philip Griffiths

Dancers : Alice Browaeys, Camille Rouze, Charlotte Ensergueix, Claire Dutilleul, Everton Lampe, Marie Pons, Marion Sage, Nadia Ben Mahiddine, Yon Costes, Georges Le Moal, Gerry Quevreux, Jerome Feigean, Manuela Fiori Schneider, Maria Montesi, Marion Fougeret, Marion Rethy, Maud Bouchat, Paola di Bella, Paola Zompierlo, Remi Hollant, Thomas Boivin, Lê Trung-Tien

Thanks to our partners : Neolux, Pialex, Vink, SEM/VR, Groupe Alto & Le gymnase CDC

Exhumeia is speaking trought bodies of the individual’s condition facing the collective society and power relations that this equation requires.

From a movie to a all night long performance passing by an exhibition space, the wheel, as a unique light source, paces and transforms each site it enlightened.

Using the geographical context as a decor, the audience is litteraly immersed in a movie where the boundaries with real are blurred.

2011, site-specific performance and video

20 Neons light on battery

Created by Gabriel Beck

Curator : Salomon Anaya

During summer 2011, a letter was distributed to 352 inhabitants of Flateyria village in Iceland. Day after day, chapter after chapter, the letter plays on the idea of the reveletion and invites inhabitants to site-specific art installations that Gabriel Beckinger active by performance. Neon light battery powered , as light object, act here the power of revealing architecture and landscape as a scene for theatre and fiction.