harbor
Performance · Premiere
by
jee chan
In the frame of Fold – New Works #2
Drawing upon the vital connection between dance and ritual, «harbor» is a space where I manifest a meeting with my maternal grandmother. As a young girl, she was forced to cross a sea, fleeing a Japanese invasion of her birth home in Guangzhou to Singapore. Following her passing in 2018, I began to shift my choreographic position from one of dancing to being danced. By understanding my own body as a medium within the continuum of an extended ancestral legacy, «harbor» articulates the memory of displacement, migration and violence passed on through generations. A dream, a coastline, a horizon, a cry, a tremor, a ripple, a cloud, a portal.
jee chan
jee chan is an artist and choreographer whose practices make visible the significant but obscure (big and true, just beneath the surface). Paying attention to how histories settle and sediment in the body, they navigate questions concerning the displaced body and what it can perform. Regarding choreography as an expanded formal proposition, they work with a range of media including performance, video, installation, text, and photography.
Concept, Choreography, Performance: jee chan
By & with: 蕭曼兒 Seow Mok Jee
Sound design: Chong Li-Chuan, Hilà Lahav
Light design: Gretchen Blegen
Things & Space: stefan pente
Technical direction: Martin Pilz
Translation support: Cary Shiu
Production assistance: Phoebe von Düffel, Aki Hassan
In co-production with Tanzfabrik Berlin. Funded through the Einzelprojektförderung of the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe. Residency support from Tanzfabrik Berlin and Dance Nucleus, Singapore. Research process supported by Goethe-Institute Singapore and the National Arts Council, Singapore.
↪ FURTHER BIOGRAPHIES
Gretchen Blegen is an interdisciplinary artist who explores ways of seeing and hearing space, light, sound, and image. Her work engages with research-based navigations and narrations coming from an anti-extractivist mindset. These are rooted in a desire to direct the gaze away from the surface and towards feelings of resonance, towards that which feels. To submerge. The link between these different media are collective practices of listening, hosting, and imaginative (re)forming of worlds. Gretchen (fluid) was born and raised in the southwestern areas of the usa and currently lives in berlin.
Chong Li-Chuan (b.1975) is a Singaporean composer who is passionate about philosophy, culture, and the arts. Li-Chuan's career in music and sound started in the late '90s, with work as a composer and sound designer collaborating with practitioners in theatre, dance, spoken word, architecture, filmmaking, design, and visual art. His creative output includes music composition, sound design, site-specific art, installation, free improvisation, and collaborative work exploring the conversations to be had between music and sound, and across different modes of expression.
Hilà Lahav is a musician, composer and writer, based in Berlin since 2017. With instruments, electronics and visuals, she has been collaborating with dancers, performers, and sound artists on many stage- art- and music-projects. She is a part of the collective running ausland-Berlin, an independent space for music, arts and collateral damage. Her latest collaboration with Abigail Akavia - a performance musical piece for an original text and score, based on aeschylus, will premiere in Schaubühne Lindenfels in Leipzig from 24. to 26.3.2023.
stefan pente born 1964 in zürich, switzerland, I became a nurse in a psychiatric hospital in the mid-80s, studied art in the 90s and am based in berlin since 1995. I view art as a system of actions intended to change / make worlds rather than encode symbolic or semiotic propositions about it. I use sculpture, painting, installation, sometimes performance and video to create situations where I can see things as they are and not as what I think to know them to be.
↪ FURTHER BIOGRAPHIES
Gretchen Blegen is an interdisciplinary artist who explores ways of seeing and hearing space, light, sound, and image. Her work engages with research-based navigations and narrations coming from an anti-extractivist mindset. These are rooted in a desire to direct the gaze away from the surface and towards feelings of resonance, towards that which feels. To submerge. The link between these different media are collective practices of listening, hosting, and imaginative (re)forming of worlds. Gretchen (fluid) was born and raised in the southwestern areas of the usa and currently lives in berlin.
Chong Li-Chuan (b.1975) is a Singaporean composer who is passionate about philosophy, culture, and the arts. Li-Chuan's career in music and sound started in the late '90s, with work as a composer and sound designer collaborating with practitioners in theatre, dance, spoken word, architecture, filmmaking, design, and visual art. His creative output includes music composition, sound design, site-specific art, installation, free improvisation, and collaborative work exploring the conversations to be had between music and sound, and across different modes of expression.
Hilà Lahav is a musician, composer and writer, based in Berlin since 2017. With instruments, electronics and visuals, she has been collaborating with dancers, performers, and sound artists on many stage- art- and music-projects. She is a part of the collective running ausland-Berlin, an independent space for music, arts and collateral damage. Her latest collaboration with Abigail Akavia - a performance musical piece for an original text and score, based on aeschylus, will premiere in Schaubühne Lindenfels in Leipzig from 24. to 26.3.2023.
stefan pente born 1964 in zürich, switzerland, I became a nurse in a psychiatric hospital in the mid-80s, studied art in the 90s and am based in berlin since 1995. I view art as a system of actions intended to change / make worlds rather than encode symbolic or semiotic propositions about it. I use sculpture, painting, installation, sometimes performance and video to create situations where I can see things as they are and not as what I think to know them to be.
