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Blog Archive

Æffective Choreography

How does your body feel today?

In this time of velocity and violence, choreographer and performer André Uerba explores intimacy as a practice of being together, along with seven performers and a musician. This work plays with the boundaries between sharing and withdrawing, movement and stillness, vulnerability and exposure.

The performers structure their encounter through a slow pace, propelling their bodies to attune, sink and merge together, refining their present moment. The desire to make hidden things visible is unfolded by their intimate gestures. Collectively they turn their gaze to inner landscapes where slowness and touch become a main practice.

In English

Please note that this production contains nudity.

Bypass Portal

Bypass Portal explores the complex interplay of human behavior, the sensation of being observed, censorship and disruptions across various settings.

While examining the nuances of existence within space and crafting strategies for survival, the performance scrutinizes the ongoing influence and potential threats posed by powerful political forces on our lives, regardless of our location. Simultaneously, it invites the possibility of envisioning alternative ways of being—whether alone, together, or somewhere in between.

In English, Farsi and Spanish

Play Bow

Play Bow utilizes a blend of street and contemporary dance, an original electronics and strings composition, voice and costumes informed by Jung’s theory of the animal self to build a moving metaphor of canine play behavior.

We draw parallels between human and canine social roles and explore how they are revealed in human relationships – especially during courting rituals. At times, the piece is set in an electronic music club, where we celebrate, search for a lover and express social dominance / submission.

Ken Christianson (composer) and Sami Giron (choreographer) have been collaborating since 2005, when they met at California Institute
of the Arts while earning their Master’s degrees.

With very little spoken language (English)

Bestseller

A danced requiem for an unintentionally funny humor philosopher in German, Polish and English. Two performers explore the contradictions of life with the help of a Bach cantata, a curtain and a special performative subtlety.
The starting point of the play is the (inevitable) death of one’s father. A common past ceases to be shared and becomes entirely our responsibility. The two performers dance their way through spiritual questions. A particular sense of trust makes them ready to work with whatever comes their way.
Why is something funny and when? Is humor a survival technique? How simple or complicated can it be, can we be? Do God, the devil and sin exist or are they just bad jokes that we are expected to laugh at?

SURPRISING (taniecpolska.pl) WELL-BALANCED AND IRONIC (teatrologia.info) VINTAGE IN THE PERFORMING ARTS (culture.pl) BETWEEN SERIOUSNESS AND UN-SERIOUSNESS (e-teatr.pl)

Soldier M.I.A.

Soldier M.I.A. is a collaborative dance performance that attempts to re-imagine a Chinese queer feminist future, through the story of the female soldier, Hua Mulan (花木兰).

According to the classic legend, Mulan is a young woman who disguises herself as a man, in order to join the army and go to battle in her father’s place. On the surface, the story seems to advocate woman empowerment and emancipation; however at its root, it actually instrumentalizes female representation and bodies for patriarchal and nationalist purposes.

Framed as a fictive search-and-rescue mission, Soldier M.I.A. plays with the idea that Mulan has somehow gone missing in action (M.I.A.). Four “experts” with diverse Chinese backgrounds – a dancer, a dramaturg, a sound artist and a costume artist – join forces to find Mulan, using a mix of literary references, video footage of Chinese opera and personal stories. Together with the help of the audience, they will try to reconstruct the story of Mulan through a queer and feminist lens. Their task is to bring forth a new Mulan-in-action (M.I.A.). What battle will Soldier M.I.A. join in today? Whose flag will she be flying… or burning?

There will be a short post-show discussion after each performance.

On Saturday, November 25 at 4pm, Ming Poon will also hold an artist talk as part of his research project S.O.A.R. Queen (Study of a Rice Queen), which is supported by Berliner Förderprogramm Künstlerische Forschung. The talk will last approximately 90 minutes and admission is free of charge.

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Present Body 2

In the moment of improvisation, a special, almost magical presence of the body emerges. Anything seems possible, even identity breaks free of its fixed structures and bonds and allows itself to be reinvented every moment.

Using music and dance, all of the artists weave their own experiences and memories into a common whole that remains in constant motion. Thoughts and ideas flash up, are taken up by the group and develop into something else. In this way, new connections and possibilities are always created, the power of change is revealed.

Present Body 2 is a live improvisation with dance and music dedicated to the decolonization of bodies. It builds up the performance of Present Body, which was recorded in November 2020 as part of the MIMIMI Space project and presented digitally at HAU4. The new version now links the Black and white perspectives: dancers from Grupo Oito and MIMIMI Space enter into dialogue with each other. They bring in their experiences and the physical repertoire of the last productions, in which they worked on a new form of physicality and being from different perspectives, thus looking for what they have in common and what connects them. Understand the past, dance the present and dream the future in your own way!

A post-performance discussion moderated by Nora Amin will be held on Wednesday, November 15

Transatlantica

Through an autobiographical reappraisal of choreographer Caroline Alves’ family history, the solo performance Transatlantica delves into the voids between Brazil and Europe, between past and present.

It is one among many family histories that are marked by settler colonialism in Brazil: histories based on the erasure of indigenous ancestors, carrying colonial continuities into the present. Following the traces of Senhorinha, the indigenous great-great-grandmother of whom only the colonial name remains, Caroline Alves explores the violent nexus of patriarchy and colonialism.

Transatlantica interweaves dance and storytelling, atmospherically oscillating between the elements of the stage set: the crystalline cold of a block of ice and the spreading, reflecting water that connects the continents. With tenderness and rage, Caroline Alves confronts her ancestral history and present, searching in the voids of the “official narrative” for the place from which to speak with her own words and movements that may break with the vast silence.

The Intervention of Loneliness

“All the lonely people, where do they all come from? All the lonely people, where do they all belong?” – The Beatles

Today we are living in the age of systemic loneliness. Despite the world being more interconnected and globalized than ever before, the number of lonely people continues to grow. Even before the pandemic started, loneliness was already a widespread problem: according to studies, one in ten people living in Germany felt lonely frequently or all the time. The pandemic has only made it worse. Social media, technology, capitalism, hedonistic consumer culture, neoliberal work ethics and urban way of living are contributing to the rise in loneliness and benefiting from it at the same time. Together they form a system that exposes us to loneliness on a daily basis and on a global scale. It not only affects our personal well-being, but also undermines our sense of collective belonging.

The Intervention of Loneliness is a collaborative dance performance that looks at the issue of systemic loneliness and human disconnection. Developed from an earlier public intervention (Dance With Me) – in which Ming Poon traveled to different cities asking strangers on the street to slow dance with him – this performance invites us to confront systemic loneliness together onstage. Slow dancing becomes an act of resistance, as our bodies reach out, make contact and hold each other. How can we reclaim loneliness, rather than letting it own us? What has the pandemic taught us about it? How can we transform loneliness from a place of separation and isolation into a tool for collective action and solidarity?

Note: A post-performance discussion will be offered after every show.

Ming Poon is a Berlin-based choreographer who began his career as professional dancer in 1993 and started to develop his choreographic practice in 2010. He works with applied choreography and creates choreographic interventions, where spectators are invited to exercise their agency to create change. His works are interactive and collaborative in design. They usually take the form of collaborative performances, public interventions and one-to-one encounters, and involve vulnerability, care, peripherality, queerness and failure as performance strategies. His practice is influenced by Buddhist concept of interdependence and care, Judith Butler’s resistance in vulnerability, Augusto Boal’s theater of the oppressed and Nicolas Bourriaud’s micro-utopias.

He initiated Asian Performing Artists Lab (APAL) in 2020 and is a founding member of United Networks gUG, a non-profit organisation for marginalized BIPoC artists in Germany. He is currently a fellow in the Berlin Artistic Research Program (2022-2023).

His works have been presented at Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay (Singapore), The Substation (Singapore), English Theatre Berlin | International Performing Arts Center (Berlin, Germany), Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin, Germany), Scenario Pubblico | Centro Nazionale di Produzione della Danza (Catania, Italy) and Südpol (Luzern, Switzerland).

Transatlantica

Through an autobiographical reappraisal of choreographer Caroline Alves’ family history, the solo performance Transatlantica delves into the voids between Brazil and Europe, between past and present.

It is one among many family histories that are marked by settler colonialism in Brazil: histories based on the erasure of indigenous ancestors, carrying colonial continuities into the present. Following the traces of Senhorinha, the indigenous great-great-grandmother of whom only the colonial name remains, Caroline Alves explores the violent nexus of patriarchy and colonialism.

Transatlantica interweaves dance and storytelling, atmospherically oscillating between the elements of the stage set: the crystalline cold of a block of ice and the spreading, reflecting water that connects the continents. With tenderness and rage, Caroline Alves confronts her ancestral history and present, searching in the voids of the “official narrative” for the place from which to speak with her own words and movements that may break with the vast silence.

History Has Failed Us, But…

If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution.

These words, attributed to the anarchist author Emma Goldman, serve as a starting point for the performance and accompany the choreographic investigation of protest and resistance. In what ways does a dancing body become an empowered body and what contradictions may arise from this empowerment? How can individual and collective bodies become resistant through movement? Which narratives and images of resistance linger in our memories and how can they be spoken about and shared?

Inspired by past and present revolts against injustices such as the Gezi Park protests in Turkey, the viral feminist performances of Las Tesis and the anger over the Sewol tragedy in South Korea, History has failed us, but… recounts protest movements from the perspective of queers and people of color – people whose bodies are still read as “Other” and “foreign.” The choreography combines visions of future demonstrations with existing traditional dances, such as the Korean ganggangsullae, which has been danced for centuries by women’s groups during the full moon for catharsis, into an exchange of playful lightness and political urgency.

Throughout the evening, the dancers draw strength from physically activating specific moments, citing powerful poses and creating togetherness in solidarity together with the audience. The dancing bodies thus become a form of non-violent opposition against discrimination and racism and enrich the imagery and ideas of political movements.