He wore shorts and a shirt. She was in a black midi dress and had tassels hanging down one side of her face. He made straight lines using a paint brush. She created sharp movements with her hands and looked like she might be imitating an aeroplane.
The dance-action-painting performance, titled ‘Code Coromandel,’ held at Alliance Francaise, drew a small and niche crowd. While Laurent Joubert made abstract art inspired by kolams, Christine Graz moved to minimalist repetitive beats from the 60s. Together, they aimed at creating art by responding to each other and to the music.
“I don’t need to see her, I feel what she’s doing,” laughed Laurent, but then he admitted to looking at her sometimes to respond to her art. “I started the performance doing just stripes and she made minimalist gestures. When she started rolling and making curves, I made the motif rolling and curling too,” he explains.
Roll and curl she did, quite often on the floor. At one point in the performance, face front on the floor lay Christine, and slowly crawled her way into a Kimono that was placed there. She got up, donned a black top hat and shades, and began dreamily bounding across stage. At another point, she lay on the floor for a while, twirling her legs around before lazily propping herself up on one elbow to stare at the audience. She later explained that Laurent rushed her before the performance and she just fancied a rest while it was still going on.
Christine’s antics involved some fluid and many jerky movements, while Laurent made overlapping patterns of lines and swirls on rectangular white sheets. It wasn’t always clear, what the pair were trying to create or communicate. Art, though, is open to interpretation, and as far as was obvious, they were just being abstract.
