Created in partnership with Alpine.
Twenty-four hours at Le Mans.
Since 1923, this quaint town on the cusp of Normandy and the Loire Valley has seen and heard countless high-speed circuits, daredevil drivers rattling off lap after lap as the sun rises, peaks, and falls again in the rear-view. This is the pinnacle of endurance racing: an extreme human feat of repetition that, for those involved, turns motorsport into an otherworldly ritual.
During France’s famous day-long race, the relationship between human and machine gets weird and wired. By the end, the driver wears their car like a fist wears a glove, the two punching their way through the air in perfect tandem. It feels like this dynamic may have been the starting point for a new film produced by boundary-disrespecting sports car brand Alpine and dance collective, (LA)Horde. It’s hard to say for sure. Because… well, you’ll see.
Since 2011, (LA)Horde—led by Marine Brutti, Jonathan Debrouwer, and Arthur Harel from their base at the Ballet National de Marseille—have been pioneering a new form of performance art, what they call ‘post-internet dance.’
Within 17 seconds of their new film beginning, you understand what this means, as a dancer jerks discordantly in a spotlight. It looks spooky and alien. If the dance had been shown to people hundreds of years ago, they would have thought they were looking at some kind of haunted marionette and recoiled in terror. But viewed today, (LA)Horde’s dancers unmistakably take their cues from video game characters, and other avatars we use to navigate the digital world.
Right from the start, it’s a performance that makes perfect sense of the film’s title, I DON’T REMEMBER WHAT IT WAS NOT TO KNOW YOU. None of us will ever be the same now that we’ve known the internet. It’s not just a tool we use, it’s something that uses us back: rewiring our brains, bending our thumbs and backs out of shape during marathon screentime sessions lasting nearly as long as Le Mans. Rather than shying away from that relationship, (LA)Horde’s dancers sashay arm-in-arm with the web into strange and exhilarating new territory.
It feels like the film establishes a clever parallel with what happens at Le Mans. Just as no human could navigate that race track on foot, so we need avatars to move through the virtual realm with purpose and grace—in that perfect tandem: like a gloved fist.
Yet in I DON’T REMEMBER WHAT IT WAS NOT TO KNOW YOU the avatars are fish out of water, tip-toeing their way lightly through ‘meatspace,’ their wet goggle eyes scanning the horizon desperately for traction. They look like lost astronauts, gatecrashers at a house party, out of place and out of time, as all human attention is fixed upon the track and its cars.
It’s genuinely touching when, at one point in the film, the avatars begin to weep.
At the film’s conclusion, a dozen or so dancers congregate for a perfectly-calibrated display of group defiance. Their performance feels like technology expressing itself, and leads to a reconciliation with the car, as they dance with and caress the A290, a new hot hatch conceived in Alpine’s aptly named Dream Garage.
Escaping the Grids
For months, Alpine and (LA)Horde—these two great, French disruptors of culture—worked together on the film, aiming to live up to their reputations by articulating something profound, forward-thinking, and beautiful about Le Mans and motorsport more generally. It may seem unusual that a car manufacturer and a dance collective should collaborate in this way. But both brands have shown an unswerving commitment to innovating in order to hit ever-higher levels of performance, whether that be on the road or the dance floor, the track or the stage.
What does this mean?
It means that a car company can be more in tune with experimental dancers if it stops thinking like other car companies—and experimental dancers can move more akin to pixel-borne video game avatars than anything you’d see at the Royal Ballet if they aren’t afraid to go toe-to-toe with the internet and new tech rather than turning their backs on it.
What unites both Alpine and (LA)Horde is the bravery to take that first step away from the pack.
Watch the full collaborative film from Alpine and (LA)Horde at YouTube now.
The post You’ll Never Dance in an Offline World Again appeared first on VICE.
The post You’ll Never Dance in an Offline World Again appeared first on VICE.
