MBS-A-002-F-007-S-001
For a better tomorrow — Between November 2025 and July 2026
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DEVELOPMENT STATUS
The series is currently under development. The first study takes the form of a filmed choreographic sequence performed in a dark suit and structured through speed, precision and the progressive loss of physical support. Future developments will include additional video studies, movement scores, musical fragments, costume protocols and reports documenting the physical states experienced by the performer. Each new unit will be assigned an archival number, a musical source, a sequence of measures and a specific research protocol. The studies may be presented independently or assembled within an installation, performance, audiovisual edition or archival volume. The series forms part of the living archives of Mackenzy Bergile Studio.
Study No. 001
DR. JACKLE: COLONIAL MEASURES
For a better tomorrow — Between November 2025 and July 2026
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DEFINITION
Dr. Jackle: Colonial Measures designates an ongoing series of choreographic, musical and audiovisual studies engaging with the embodied memory of jazz. The series examines how Black dances and musical forms developed under colonial and segregationist regimes: as practices of invention, virtuosity and disruption, but also within stages structured by white spectatorship, racial display and the economies of visibility inherited from minstrelsy. Dr. Jackle is conceived as a fictional and unstable figure—simultaneously doctor, performer and archival body. Moving between mastery and dislocation, the figure examines what music has deposited within the body and what the body continues to perform without always being able to name its origin.CONSERVATION PROTOCOL
Each study is preserved as an autonomous archival unit. Original video recordings, successive edits, musical references, choreographic notes, costume elements and bodily reports are retained together with their dates, technical information and conditions of production. Corrections, interruptions and variations are not removed from the archive. They are preserved as evidence of the physical and conceptual transformations occurring throughout the research. No version is considered definitive. Each document remains available for future reactivation, comparison and reinterpretation within subsequent studies.RESEARCH PROTOCOL
Each study begins with the extraction of a musical fragment: a measure, rhythmic phrase, rupture or acceleration drawn from jazz archives. The body does not attempt to reconstruct a historical dance. It enters into contact with its surviving traces. Through repetition, displacement, exhaustion and disarticulation, movement is passed through successive states until it can no longer be contained within a single interpretation. Virtuosity is approached both as a space of invention and as a strategy of visibility developed within stages historically organised by other gazes. Costume operates as a second score. It activates the contradictory histories of elegance, respectability, spectacle and caricature, holding the performer between control and disruption. Each filmed study documents this negotiation between the body, the musical archive and the colonial conditions of appearance.DEVELOPMENT STATUS
The series is currently under development. The first study takes the form of a filmed choreographic sequence performed in a dark suit and structured through speed, precision and the progressive loss of physical support. Future developments will include additional video studies, movement scores, musical fragments, costume protocols and reports documenting the physical states experienced by the performer. Each new unit will be assigned an archival number, a musical source, a sequence of measures and a specific research protocol. The studies may be presented independently or assembled within an installation, performance, audiovisual edition or archival volume. The series forms part of the living archives of Mackenzy Bergile Studio.
