Tanzfabrik
Berlin
Stage
Stage
Stage
Stage Galerie Patrick Ebensperger Stage
Stage

Videoworks

Performance by Ian Kaler, Anne Quirynen, Pauline Boudry, Renate Lorenz, Bjørn Melhus, Meg Stuart, Penelope Wehrli
In the frame of 8th Tanznacht Berlin 2014

An Kaler / Anne Quirynen On Orientations | Shifting the burden
Shifting the burden is a collaboration between the video artist Anne Quirynen and the choreographer An Kaler. The piece is the result of research on the perception of movement in the transition between different artistic speeches and works. The installation fluidly shifts between the media of painting, video art and choreography. A figure inscribes a second figure. The body, projected onto a black surface, is trapped in a frame. It seems robbed of its corporeality, accompanied by a sound that resembles the attempt of drawing and the movement sequence, in the knowledge that the attempt to hear and see movement can only fail.

Concept and realisation: An Kaler and Anne Quirynen. Choreography: An Kaler. Video, Video and
Installation: Anne Quirynen. Supported by PACT Zollverein Essen, MA7

 

Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz CONTAGIOUS!
Installation with HD video, 12 min and 11 photographies, 2010
Contagious! exposes the subversive forms of protest within popular styles of dance around 1900 and traces the then widespread idea of epidemic infection through physical imitation. The filmed performance shows the origin of the “Epileptic Dance” and the “Cakewalk” on the stage of the legendary Café Concert in fin de siècle Paris. The dancers of the Belle Époque copied, distorted and subverted the poses of the ‘hysterics’, labelled ‘sick’ at the time, transforming their unique power and expressiveness into a spectacular dance. The fashionable dance the ‘cakewalk’ originated amongst the slaves of the plantations in the American South and mocked the stilted, stiff demeanor of the whites. Within a short period of time it became widespread and popular, abolishing and retaining the traumatic experiences of slavery and colonialism in a spectacular way.

Concept: Pauline Boudry und Renate Lorenz. Performers: Arantxa Martinez and Vaginal Davis.Director of Photography: Bernadette Paassen. Sound: Johanna Herr, Karin Michalski. Sound design: Rashad Becker. Set Photography: Andrea Thal. Make Up: Tan Nguyen. DP Assistant: Tim Ottenstein

 

Meg Stuart The Only Possible City
Video, 2008 (German premiere)
“The face is at once the irreparable being-exposed of humans and the very opening in which they hide and stay hidden. The face is the only location of community, the only possible city. (Giorgio Agamben)

In 2008, Meg Stuart was invited to Manifesta7. She came to Bolzano to work with a small crew on the second floor of the Allumix Building. The aim: to shoot a video. Time foreseen: six days of work. The face-to-face videos of Vito Acconci came to mind, time capsules of compressed presence revolving around simple actions and relational axes. “I think of images as excavation sites. To vacillate between the simplest of gestures, working the trace suspended in repetition, the face: the prime canvas. The close-up as a means to hone the optical unconscious and involuntary memories of everyday behavior, singular and collective, manufactured and fractured at the same time. What’s in the timing of things? Every work is made under the specifics of a time regime. To choreograph is to come to terms with that regime. To dance is to traverse it. Face it.”

Concept and Performance: Meg Stuart. Photography and Editing: Jorge Léon & Aliocha Van der Avoort. A Raqs Media Collective and Damaged Goods production commissioned by MANIFESTA 7

 

Penelope Wehrli House of Snow
Real time generated video and sound installation 2013/14
A video of a bee colony on a honeycomb. Three texts on natural history by Stanisław Lem, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Maurice Maeterlinck on the transformation and origin of different temporal processes. Sound material is from ‘my gait’, a long term study about the artist katrinem’s own pace of walking in the city. The sequence of sound and text is triggered by the movements of the bees.

A piece about perception and time and the process of reading and understanding.
A small homage to Richard Buckminster Fuller.

Concept, text and video: Penelope Wehrli. System architecture and implementation: Joa Glasstetter. Sonarisation and sound material: katrinem. Supported by TESLA Berlin e.V.

 

Bjørn Melhus MAESTRA
Video, 3’00 min., loop, (2009/2014)
A hooded rider heavily armed with high-tech weapons sits on a traditional Mexican saddle on a horse which seems to be dancing to folk sounds. The interplay between rider and horse seems at times choreographed, at times uncoordinated.

Maestra, the name of the Mexican horse, means ‘Mistress’ or ‘Teacher’ and one asks oneself who is holding the reins in this piece. The video MAESTRA is from yet to be released material from the production HECHO EN MEXICO (2009) which references Mexican narco-culture and militarisation of the country.

Konzept und Realisation: Bjørn Melhus

Ian Kaler

Ian Kaler studied Transmedial Art at University for Applied Arts Vienna. Ian's artistic practise combines dance, performance and visual art. In 2010 Ian graduated from the BA Pilotprogramm "Contemporary Dance, Context, Choreography" at Inter-University Center for Dance, University of the Arts Berlin. In 2010 Ian started working on a longterm creative and physical practice, "Insignificant Others". The first raw explorations of the practice with audience in "Untitled Stills" in 2010/11 were followed up by the premiere of "(learning to look sideways)" at Tanzquartier Vienna in December 2011. "Insignificant Others" (learning to look sideways) was presented in 2012 at Tanztage in Sophiensaele Berlin, at Rencontres Choreographiques Internationales de Seine-Saint-Denis, at ImPulsTanz Vienna and Tanznacht Berlin. Currently Ian is working on a new series "On Orientations – the first etape", "On Orientations | one place after" was presented in Uferstudios / Tanzfabrik Berlin in February 2013. "On Orientations | Untimely Encounters" was premiered in May 2013. The current project "Contingencies" permiered in 2014 in Berlin and in a new version with another cast at ImPulsTanz in Wien. As performer Ian Kaler worked a.o. with Philipp Gehmacher, Isabelle Schad and Laurent Chétouane.

Anne Quirynen

Pauline Boudry

Renate Lorenz

Bjørn Melhus

Bjørn Melhus, geboren 1966, ist ein deutsch-norwegischer Medienkünstler. Er gilt als einer der international renommiertesten Videokünstler seiner Generation. Mit der Erweiterung der Möglichkeiten einer kritischen Rezeption von Kino und Fernsehen hat er sich eine singuläre künstlerische Position erarbeitet. Seine Strategie der Zersplitterung, Destruktion und Rekonstruktion bekannter Figuren, Themen und der Struktur der Massenmedien eröffnet nicht nur die Möglichkeit einer Vielzahl neuer Interpretationen und kritischer Kommentare, sondern definiert auch die Beziehung von Massenmedien und Zuschauer neu.

Meg Stuart

Born in New Orleans, Meg Stuart is an American choreographer and dancer who lives and works in Berlin and Brussels. The daughter of theatre directors, she began dancing and acting at an early age in California and regularly performed in her parents’ productions and those made by family friends. She made her first dance studies as a teenager focussing on simple movement actions. Stuart decided to move to New York in 1983 and studied dance at New York University. She continued her training at Movement Research where she explored numerous release techniques and was actively involved in the downtown New York dance scene. Invited to perform at the Klapstuk festival in Leuven (1991), she created her first evening-length piece, Disfigure Study, which launched her artistic career in Europe. In this choreography, Stuart approached the body as a vulnerable physical entity that can be deconstructed, distorted or displaced but still resonates and has meaning. Interested in devising her own structure through which to develop artistic projects, Stuart founded Damaged Goods in Brussels in 1994. Damaged Goods is a flexible, open structure that facilitates the production of highly diverse projects and interdisciplinary collaborations. Meg Stuart and Damaged Goods have worked on over thirty productions, ranging from solos to large-scale choreographies and including site-specific creations, installations and improvisation projects.
Stuart strives to develop a new language for every piece in collaboration with artists from different creative disciplines and navigates the tension between dance and theatre. The use of theatrical devices, in addition to the dialogue between movement and narrative, are recurrent themes in her choreographies. Stuart’s choreographic work revolves around the idea of an uncertain body, one that is vulnerable and self-reflexive. Through improvisation, Stuart explores physical and emotional states or the memories of them. Her artistic work is analogous to a constantly shifting identity. It constantly redefines itself while searching for new presentation contexts and territories for dance.
At the invitation of intendant Johan Simons, Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods became associate artists at the Münchner Kammerspiele in 2010. Damaged Goods also has an on-going collaboration with the Kaaitheater (Brussels) and the HAU Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin). In 2014, Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods is touring BLESSED (2007), VIOLET (2011), Built to Last (2012), Sketches/Notebook (2013) and Hunter (2014).

Penelope Wehrli

Penelope Wehrli, born 1957 in Zürich, lives presently in Berlin. She creates performance, site specific installation, film, video, from 1980–94 mainly in New York, and also Tel Aviv, Kassel, Berlin. Wehrli created spaces 
and costumes for the stage for the Choreographic Theater of Johann Kresniks from 1990–98, and a.o. for Jossie Wieler, Dimiter Gottscheff, Reinhild Hoffmann and Robert Schuster. She also invented spaces as independently functioning testing grounds: Last: A dream within a dream, Direction: Barbara Frey, Schauspielhaus Zürich, 2010. • Feuerfluss: Installations and public burning actions on violence/suicide in New York, Gent, Berlin, Zagreb, Sarajevo, Belgrad, 1994–97. • aether: an experimental telecommunication series to explore dialog situations. She has written and directed: a.o. operation solaris, Staatsbank Berlin, 2001; Emily on the rocks, Podewil Berlin, 2003/05; Heute mittag sitzt er nicht im Beijing, Palast der Republik, Berlin, 2004, camera orfeo, Radialsystem V, Berlin, 2009. Penelope Wehrli was Professor for Scenography at the HfG Karlsruhe from 2004–09. www.aether1.org
Free admission
Plantagenstrasse 30, 13347 Berlin