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.

Insane in the brain

‘Insane in the Brain’ is a reworked producion of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest as a feast of stunning street dance. Injecting a healthy dose of contemporary styles fused with breathtaking hip hop moves. ‘Insane in the Brain’ features a pulsating soundtrack with cuts from Missy Elliot, Dizzee Rascal, Gotan Project, David Holmes and Cypress Hill. Inventive set design and choreography are mixed with film and multimedia sequences to produce a fast-paced show that is funny, moving and packed with high-octane dance.

Uncanny State: Notion of Acceptance
In his latest exhibition Uncanny State: Notion of Acceptance, Eyal Gever presents six newly created metaphysical representations of human movement, performed by internationally acclaimed contemporary dancer and choreographer Sharon Eyal to the music of world-renowned contemporary pianist and composer Rosey Chan.

马林·比洛
マリンビューロー
말린 블로우
Μαλίν Μπάλοου
Elastic Bonding
This vertical version of Elastic Bonding was made site specifically for the Project Space at Lademoen Kunstnerverksteder in Trondheim. It was shown as part of Multiplié dance festival, an annual festival of contemporary dance in Norway. The project was a collaboration between Babel visningsrom and DansiT.

克劳斯奥伯迈尔
the concept of … (here and now)

In front of a giant screen, two dancers interact with a cohort of cameras… Their movements are captured by infra-red sensors and projected onto the screen, whereby their bodies become the canvas on which new images take shape. The result is a shifting kaleidoscope of strange, living, quasi-mathematical visual worlds which sometimes seem to be emanating or even escaping from the dancers’ bodies. “Who decides which movement to make: the man or the machine?” Blurring the line between the real and the virtual, Klaus Obermaier loves to subsume his performers’ bodies and physicality in a disconcerting digital universe. With his latest creation, the choreographer/artist has taken a bold new step. He has constructed a system of projectors and infra-red sensor-cameras, trained upon the movements of two dancers. The performers thus find themselves thrown headlong into a living, moving graphical universe: their movements are projected onto the screen, but at the same time their bodies are illuminated by more projected images. This is a true artistic performance, pushing well beyond the frontiers of a standard dance recital, or even a contemporary dance show. A corporeal, temporal performance. A choreography which makes subtle use of its raw materials, deftly combining lights, video, perspectives and the real-time power of bodily movement.

Until the Lions
In this partial adaptation of poet Karthika Naïr’s book Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata, an original reworking of the epic Mahabharata, Khan uses kathak and contemporary dance to tell the tale of Amba, a princess abducted on her wedding day and stripped of her honour, who invokes the gods to seek revenge. In an epic theatrical piece, Khan explores the notion and the physical expression of gender, bringing together some of the stellar artistic team behind his solo DESH: writer Karthika Naïr, visual artist Tim Yip, lighting designer Michael Hulls and dramaturg Ruth Little.

works
dance
“I connected with members of Sal Vanilla a Butoh dance group. Butoh is a contemporary dance form born in the sixties. We started a series of collaborations, Light painting at first, then video, then live performances. The collaboration between Sal Vanilla and I, was pure symbiosis.” Patrick Rochon

White Water and Dust
Set to the piano scores by Erik Satie and other composers, White Water is a lyrical dance of pure movement that flows beautifully as its title suggests. The curtain opens to a projected colour image of a flowing river; it slowly transforms into black and white. In serenity and in turbulence, whiteness of waves and ripples streams out of the blackness. Green netting and girds used for digital design interrupt the flow of water, thus revealing the process of creating virtual images and illusion of light, providing a pleasant surprise to the dance.
Cloud Gate
Cloud Gate is the name of the oldest known dance in China. In 1973, choreographer Lin Hwai-min adopted this classical name for the first contemporary dance company in the greater Chinese-speaking community.

Kaash
Inspired by Akram Khan’s early training in the Indian classical dance form Kathak, and the hybrid language that organically emerged when Akram’s kathak training encountered contemporary dance in his teens, a vision began to form, fuelled by a desire to learn and create through collaboration with the very best people across all the disciplines in the arts.

The rules were simple: take risks, think big and daring, explore the unfamiliar, avoid compromise and tell stories through dance that are compelling and relevant, with artistic integrity.
.

LES AVIATEURS
Born in 1966, Yann Marussich, a unique character of the contemporary dance, delivers performances which have a true impact on the audience: « scraped, disturbing, provocative, authentic ». Since 1989, he signed a score of performances and choreographies diffused all over Europe and the World. From 1993 to 2000 he evolves in the field of artistic programation asdirector of the « Théâtre de l’Usine » (Geneva) where he programs almost exclusively contemporary dance and more specifically new forms of expression.

Born and raised in the southern port city of Pula, Ferlin injects the contemporary dance world with a particularly stoic rhythm. His performances often involve little movement, despite drawing on heart-wrenching life experiences. “My work fits a lot in galleries,” he explains. “Being present and being exhibited, exhibiting the body, those are the themes.”

Self Unfinished

French choreographer Xavier Le Roy defies categorisation as a dance-maker, drawing on diverse influences from the worlds of science, performance art and contemporary dance.
In Self Unfinished (1998), Le Roy takes the audience on a journey of metamorphosis as he transforms into an extraordinary hybrid creature part machine, part alien, part human.
Employing all manner of physical devices, Le Roy creates a world of illusion that is as unsettling as it is transfixing.

Industrial Improvisation

The project investigates how kinetic design and industrial robotics can embody the complexity of movement found in contemporary dance. Using structured improvisational techniques, a combination of pre-choreographed and improvised performances have been designed to form a gestural dialog between a dancer and two robotic performers. The result is an emerging set of movements that construct an unpredictable and evolving choreography.

צ’ו סאנג צ’ול
ARGUMENT
Choe Contemporary Dance Company

The Legend of Ogie

FILE 2024 | Aesthetic Synthetics
International Electronic Language Festival
SurrealismToday.com – The Legend of Ogie – United States

What worlds exist beyond Einstein’s speed limit? Inspired by Eric Weinstein’s theory of Geometric Unity, the work explores the idea that space-time is like a melody playing over an eight-dimensional universe. Abstract and metamorphic forms transition from organic forms to parastatic patterns, creating a dance of visuals and sounds that merge into an immersive experience of fractal unfolding.

Bio

SurrealismToday.com is an artist collective and educational platform dedicated to the proliferation of surreal and visionary ontologies in contemporary art. The group began as an esoteric cargo cult dedicated to discovering the beautiful, the fantastic, and the transcendent in the pseudo-philosophical landscape of the art world. His methods include searching for gems in the digital world and infusing mystical enchantments into generative diffusion models.

gods and Pilgrims

New media artist Vvzela Kook works in various audiovisual media,including performance, theatre, computer graphics and drawing to explore contemporary performing arts such as the possibility that dance and computer-generated arts could co-exist. Kook’s video works combine technology with her artistic practice to reproduce and convert urban cityscapes into an integrated virtual experience. The condensed textures in her works connect with multiple sensual levels in our perception and reintroduce the unexplored potential of video as a medium

Hosotan

Hijikata conceived of Ankoku Butoh from its origins as an outlaw form of dance-art, and as constituting the negation of all existing forms of Japanese dance. Inspired by the criminality of the French novelist Jean Genet, Hijikata wrote manifestoes of his emergent dance form with such as titles as ‘To Prison’. His dance would be one of corporeal extremity and transmutation, driven by an obsession with death, and imbued with an implicit repudiation of contemporary society and media power. Many of his early works were inspired by figures of European literature such as the Marquis de Sade and the Comte de Lautréamont, as well as by the French Surrealist movement, which had exerted an immense influence on Japanese art and literature, and had led to the creation of an autonomous and influential Japanese variant of Surrealism, whose most prominent figure was the poet Shuzo Takiguchi, who perceived Ankoku Butoh as a distinctively ‘Surrealist’ dance-art form.

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.

西尔维·纪莲
シルヴィ·ギエム
Сильви Гиллем
실비 기옘
6000 miles away
To the shock of the dance world she left the company at 23, citing a desire for more independence, and moved to the Royal Ballet as a principal guest artist. Unlike almost any other ballet dancer — only Mikhail Baryshnikov, and to some extent Nureyev, come to mind — she not only went on to have a superstar career as an interpreter of the classics but also made an apparently effortless transition into works by contemporary choreographers while remaining a big-name box-office draw.

МАРИ ШУИНАР
Biennale Danza 2018
The programme of the 12th International Festival of Contemporary Dance of the Biennale di Venezia will bring to the stage, in the spaces of the Arsenale in Venice the artists whom I believe today represent the essence of dance as nourishment for the mind and the intellect rather than as a pure aesthetic object.

واين ماكغريغور
韦恩·麦格雷戈
웨인 맥그리거
ויין מקגרגור
ウェイン·マクレガー
Уэйн МакГрегор
rAndom International
FAR
Wayne McGregor’s anatomy-defying choreography and ground-breaking approach across dance, science, film, music, visual art and technology has fuelled a string of truly unique works. FAR is no exception. Inspired by the controversial Age of Enlightenment, FAR mines an era that first placed ‘a body in question’. Ten incredible dancers confront the distortions, sensuality and feeling of the 18th Century‘s searing contemporary sensibility to a haunting score by the critically-acclaimed composer Ben Frost. Staged in a mesmerizing environment of shadow and light (rAndom International, Lucy Carter), object and film (Moritz Junge, Ravi Deepres), FAR binds cutting edge design with choreography made from a radical cognitive research process.

ILANIO REUBIN AND ELENA SLIVNYAK
SUPREME BEINGS FASHION SHOW

The Supreme Beings Fashion Show will reveal the avant-garde concepts of two local fashion designers, Ilanio Reubin of Ilanio and Elena Slivnyak of IIMUAHII, at the spacious SOMArts Cultural Center on Thursday, March 1st. The two runway shows will showcase 8 imaginative looks from each designer, as well as two short improvisational performances by Butoh (contemporary Japanese) dancers which we find very fitting for the two creatives.Though different in aesthetic, both designers hail from similar backgrounds and aim for analogous goals. Ilanio (San Francisco Art Institute) and Elena (Academy of Art) both found the retail and fashion corporate worlds too constrictive and mass-produced, and thus ventured into their own imaginative ones.
Ilanio works to create “visually stunning fashion concepts that explicitly disregard wearability, saleability, and practicality; that embrace advanced definitions of sexuality and gender; and that defy the commercially-mandated boundary between the fashion and art worlds.” For Elena of IIMUAHIII, her avant-garde aesthetic is manifested in an intricately-crafted sportswear line.Although we’re dreaming of being in Paris (but really, when are we not?), we’re excited to watch Ilanio and IIMUAHII strut and represent San Francisco’s undeniable talent in their nontraditional fashion show and hope to see you all there as well!

video

Untitled Kinetic Sculpture #2
The old train station, having itself become a contemporary art museum, presents another kinetic sculpture within the exhibition dedicated to Cory Arcangel: “Untitled Kinetic Sculpture #2”. It is majestic and almost as banal as it is intriguing. Banal because it is composed of two columns of shelves on rollers and intriguing because these literally dance, synchronised in their bending. It takes a bit of time to get used to the work. The time needed to convince oneself that it is not an hallucinatory vision but shelves very much like every day ones, except for the fact that they are not inert. Powered by electricity, they are animated by perpetual undulatory movements that sublimate them while conferring upon them their status as a work of art. Though made of metal, they seem as supple and graceful as dancers and almost fragile, but with a regularity that is entirely robotic.

Morphs
MORPHs, short for Mobile Reconfigurable Polyhedra, are motive architectural structures which can crawl and self-assemble in order to encourage social interaction through play. These playful robotic creatures encourage the public to choreograph them into dance routines, assemble them into complex sculptural geometries or else play music at them, which they will play back over time. Groups of people can interact at any one time and eventually develop a dialogue amongst participants, through the use of contemporary digital technology.