Tanzfabrik
Berlin
Stage
Stage
Stage
Stage Uferstudios 11
Badstr. 41A, Uferstr. 23
13357 Berlin Stage
Stage

Monumental. A solo dance work made with labour

Performance by Martin Hansen
In the frame of 8th Tanznacht Berlin 2014

A dance solo made of stories, brought to life through work. “Monumental” is about the reconstruction of Anna Pavlova’s 1905 seminal solo ‘the dying swan’. Taking the historical material as his starting point, Martin Hansen explores the tension between the production of authenticity and identity, history and contemporaneity. Can you wake the dead? Have we really emancipated ourselves from the canonical works of ballet? How do we perceive beauty within the context of contemporary dance – do we need it? Searching for the continual relevance and fascination of a prominent moment from the history of dance, “Monumental” moves between the conventions of lecture performance, reconstruction and documentary theatre.

Choreography and Dance: Martin Hansen. Made with the support of Eric Green, Melanie Jame Wolf, Louise Pain and Augusto Siccardi and HZT Berlin.


Martin Hansen

Martin Hansen (AUS/DE) is a Berlin-based choreographer and artist working in performative media, within both theatre and gallery contexts. Throughout their body of work, they seek to activate and unfold queer temporalities around the dancing body and the economies of power that sustain the theatre. In their practice, archives in the form of extant photography, film, video and GIF collections are used to critically explore memory and time, with ghosts recurring as generative figures and structures upon which individual works are built. Choreography thereby acts as an organising principle, serving to activate relations between body, object, image, text, and place. Martin was a Danceweb scholar in 2013 and was named Germany’s Dancer of the Year by the magazine “tanz” in 2012.