highlike

THOMAS LEBRUN

Lied ballet

“Lied, a word of German origin and gender neutral, which represents classical music sung about strophic poem, and Ballet. Lieder’s romantic themes are transformed into movement, creating choreographic writing that begins with mime and ends with abstraction. In the end, everything comes together in a great chorus challenging genres and categories, fundamentally expressing the artist’s confidence in the dancing body”. Marcia Peltier

ADRIEN M / CLAIRE B

The Movement of Air

A frontal show for three dancers evolving in an immersive environment made up of images projected, generated and animated live. A show where two impossible ones come together: the body that flies, thanks to suspension devices and the body that fits into the image. An acrobatic and digital choreographic writing which outlines a body language opening onto other relationships to time, space and the world. Beyond the search for technical prowess, it is that of a dreamlike movement and writing through images.

Julien Prévieux

Patterns of life
Patterns of life” is a short movie by French artist Julien Prévieux dealing with the history of the technological capture of human movements. Starting with the use of chronophotography to model abnormal gait in the late 19th century, the film offers a choreographic reenactment of a long series of experiments that have been designed to extract objectified patterns of activities from the motions of living bodies, whether with the view to discipline, to control, or to target them.

Wayne McGregor

Autobiography
Autobiography is an abstract meditation on aspects of self, life and writing, a non-linear approach to a life story refracting both remembered pasts and speculative futures. McGregor worked with dancers from his company in 2017 to create choreography from old writings, personal memories, pieces of art and music that have been important in his life. From these elements, 23 sections of movement material were created, reflecting the 23 pairs of chromosomes of the human genome. The choreographic events from the 23 sections were then fed into an algorithm based on McGregor’s genetic code.

MICHAEL CLARK COMPANY

マイケル·クラーク·カンパニー
Tate Project Part I ]

The choreography rehearsed and performed in 2010 paired the rigour of classical steps with contemporary movement, a juxtaposition that paralleled Clark’s training as a ballet dancer at the Royal Ballet, and his later anti-hierarchical, anti-authoritarian choreographic experiments. Balletic poses, jumps and steps were isolated from traditional narrative sequences and made strange through repetition. The graceful leaps and turns of the trained dancers seemed awkward and uneven, just as they were often out of sync and oriented in different directions. This choreography paralleled the performance space, which was demarcated by geometric and striped floor mats designed by Charles Atlas, which resembled the large windows at the back of the hall and the black beams that extend vertically from floor to ceiling.

Katja Heitmann

Museum Motus Mori
“In 2018 we started our new project Motus Mori, in which Katja is going to research and preserve movements which are in danger of extinction. Motus Mori is a longterm project (2018-2020) that consists of an ungoing research with multiple presentations like a choreographical TED-talk, mobile movement laboratories, field researches with divers groups of people, large movement expositions, city- rituals… This way Katja and her team will work on a growing collection of endangered human movements.”

DANA CASPERSEN, WILLIAM FORSYTHE AND JOEL RYAN

White Bouncy Castle
The visitor’s unavoidable inclusion in the idiosyncratic kinetics of Dana Caspersen and William Forsythe’s «White Bouncy Castle» creates a choreographic space where there are no spectators, only participants. The choreography that appears, led by Joel Ryan’s encompassing soundtrack, is the result of complete physical destabilisation and the resulting social absurdity. The inadvertant euphoria that results from the situation is infectious and, in some cases, addictive.

princemio and onformative

Pathfinder
Created by Princemio in collaboration with onformative and presented at Choreographic Coding laboratory in Frankfurt 2013, the Pathfinder project was created with aim to contribute to the creative processes of choreographic development. To achieve this algorithms have been developed to stimulate the dancers and to create visual inspirations. By doing this, the software becomes its own creative building block, questioning the classical master slave paradigm.

Hassan Razak and Pierre Rigal

Bataille
Bataille is a confrontation between two physical actors : on one hand Hassan Razak, specialist of body percussion and on the other hand Pierre Cartonnet, specialist of acrobatics. This confrontation is a complex, paradoxical and ambiguous battle. Is it a realistic dance or a choreographic fight ? Is it a contract accepted by both parts or a unilateral violence ? Is it a fool’s game ? Is the violence undergone or granted ? Masochist or sadist ?

Batsheva Dance Company

Tabula Rasa
Ohad Naharin
Arvo Pärt: Tabula Rasa
photo Gadi Dagon

Hailed as one of the world’s preeminent contemporary choreographers, Ohad Naharin assumed the role of Artistic Director in 1990, and propelled the company into a new era with his adventurous curatorial vision and distinctive choreographic voice. Naharin is also the originator of the innovative movement language, Gaga, which has enriched his extraordinary movement invention, revolutionized the company’s training, and emerged as a growing international force in the larger field of movement practices for both dancers and non-dancers.

ÉTIENNE ROCHEFORT

WORMHOLE
“But without a narrative framework, the spectator struggles to grant the wormhole a concrete existence. WormHole is actually made up of two different parts. In performing arts, the quick passage from one universe to another is within everyone’s reach. Not to mention the cinema … On the other hand, its dramaturgical raison d’etre must be identifiable within the show, rather than in a wormhole that no one has yet been able to prove. What if in Wormhole the passage from a space odyssey to a shared apartment was made by a path called intermission? Authenticated and tested for centuries, this device would make it possible to add something concrete to all the choreographic hypotheses mentioned.” Thomas Hahn

SHARON EYAL & GAI BEHAR

CARTE BLANCHE – CORPS DE WALK
Corps de Walk combines shapes and emotions in a unique, almost extraterrestrial “walk” by androgynous creatures. It makes a number of references to Killer Pig, Sharon Eyal’s first choreography for Carte Blanche, created in 2009. In Killer Pig, a piece for female dancers, Sharon Eyal plays with multiple incarnations of sensuality with a minimalist style and intense physical expression. She pursues that approach in Corps de Walk, but this time will all the company dancers involved. As with the previous piece, the costumes suggest androgynous nudity. She has collaborated with the Israeli musician DJ Ori Lichtik for many years, and once again here his music underpins her potent choreographic language, whose rhythm constantly evokes a beating heart.

CHUNKY MOVE

Glow
Glow is an illuminating 30-minute choreographic essay by Artistic Director Gideon Obarzanek and interactive software creator Frieder Weiss. Beneath the glow of a sophisticated video tracking system, a lone organic being mutates in and out of human form into unfamiliar, sensual and grotesque creature states. Utilising the latest in interactive video technologies a digital landscape is generated in real time in response to the dancer’s movement. The body’s gestures are extended by and in turn manipulate the video world that surrounds it, rendering no two performances exactly the same.