Dance On Ensemble at Dance Munich Festival

Programme 1 (video stream)

“And one – two – three – four …” The usual command doesn’t set the tempo of the music in the pieces by Lucinda Childs, but of the silence. Her evening performance of “Works in Silence” brings together five important works from the 1970s. Childs, who is among the most significant and productive choreographers of the present, was a member of the innovative Judson Dance Theater movement. The collective revolutionized dance in New York in the 1960s. Childs varies walking, hopping, and running, she experiments with the behavior of the human body during rapid changes in direction, and the effect of minimal shifts in movement patterns. The dancers of the Dance On ensemble bring the hypnotic effect of these works back to the stage approximately 45 years after their world premiere.

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Programme 2 (live stream)

This evening presents two dance pieces by Rabih Mroué, the Lebanese artist, actor, and performer who lives in Berlin; he created the pieces for and with the superb dancers of the ensemble Dance On. After “Water Between Three Hands” (2016) the internationally renowned artist and the company worked together for a second time. In “Elephant” (2018) he uses – as in many of his pieces – documentary material in order to blend personal and collective archives into one another. Here it’s pencil sketches of bodies lying on the ground. Are these people resting? Are they sleeping? The restrained atmosphere soon gives way to other associations, images of victims of violence or refugees whose lifeless bodies washed ashore. For a year Rabih Mroué gave himself the task of sketching a dead body every day. For “Elephant” three hundred and sixteen images from this collection were selected, and over the course of the piece they will be projected on the back wall of the stage. Jone San Martin and Ty Boomershine translate with Mroué the concept into movement; Mattef Kuhlmey composed the music for the piece.

For the second work of the evening, “You Should Have Seen Me Dancing Waltz” (2019) Rabih Mroué also worked closely with the dancers. Reports about deaths and destruction, horrible images as soon as you page through a newspaper and which keep recuring – what if one would never get used to this? The dancers read the newspaper, we hear the sentences, movement echoes, and in turn they are put into words. Rabih Mroué poses political and moral questions with both pieces, and he transposes them into space, speaking, and dance.

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Constellation Mal Pelo
Bach Project

A constellation on Mal Pelo’s research on Johann Sebastian Bach and his relationship with dance and the stage.

Bach is a rigorous piece of language of movement for which María Muñoz needed to travel alone to what were probably non-negotiable places in terms of her deep understanding of musicality. She herself dances it in the Constellation. The same piece is also danced by the Italian performer Federica Porello, who learned it from María Muñoz in an intensive transmission process.

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Checking Out
Dance Film by Charlotta Öfverholm & Age on Stage

Film: Anders J. Larsson <br>Photo: Fabian Kriese

Choreography: Charlotta Öfverholm

Film: Anders J. Larsson

Cast: Magnus Krepper, Elena Fokina, Tobias Hallgren, James Friedman, Lauri Antila, Charlotta Öfverholm, Jan Alpsjö, Lars Hällegård, Elna Fagerberg, Anita Berger, Eva Broms
Music: Lauri Antila
Sound: Mia Kaasalainen
Costume: Linda Öhrn and Elle Kunnos de Voss
Dramaturgy: Carina Nildalen

Premiere: 24 February 2021, Dalateatern, Falun, Sweden

A new film version of Charlotta Öfverholm’s stage production Prosthesis, featuring professional and non-professional performers aged 40 – 81.

“You can check out at anytime, but you can never leave”

A surrealistic detective story, set in a hotel, where the psychological issues and behaviours of the guests and employees make them all suspects in a crime. The investigating detective is actually is searching for the meaning of life. Former hotel guests from centuries ago are watching with unexpected powers.

 

CONSTELLATION OLGA MESA AND FRANCISCO RUIZ DE INFANTE

After a career that began in Spain and continued in Strasbourg, in the 1990s Olga Mesa earned international recognition with her solos. In 2005 she created the company Hors Champ / Fuera de Campo and in 2010 was joined by the visual and technology artist Francisco Ruiz de Infante. Together they developed projects for prestigious museums, inventing a universe in which their artistic languages, concerns and respective experiences interact.

This constellation immerses the audience in the artist’s creation and career – a “relationship map” that offers multiple perspectives through performances, films, theoretical and practical experiences.

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Works In Silence
Lucinda Childs & Dance On Ensemble

Photo & Video: Jubal Battisti

Choreography: Lucinda Childs

Staging: Ty Boomershine

Cast: Ty Boomershine, Anna Herrmann, Emma Lewis, Gesine Moog, Omagbitse Omagbemi, Lia Witjes-Poole
Light: Martin Beeretz
Sound: Mattef Kuhlmey
Costume: Alexandra Sebbag

Online-Premiere: 18 – 20 December 2020, STUK – House for Dance, Image and Sound 

The WORKS IN SILENCE offer insights into a decisive development phase of one of the most important choreographers of the 20th century.

This collection of early works from the extensive repertory of Lucinda Childs is exciting both because of its rarity and its importance in the dance field. Most of these works have not been seen since they were first shown in the 1970s. In these dances, Childs has left behind props, objects, the spoken word, symbolic movement – all hallmarks of the era of the Judson Dance Theater – and chosen to focus on the passage of the body through space. To zero in on the essence of initial movement, which, for Childs, is the act of walking. From walking to running, to changing direction, to skipping, to leaping: the WORKS IN SILENCE illustrate the evolution of movement into dance through the choreographic vision of Lucinda Childs.

“I think it’s very musical for dancers to share a pulse,” she says. “They have to listen to each other. That’s what a musical ensemble does. They tune in to each other in a very precise way.” The pieces are a rare entrance into a crucial period of transformation of a choreographer and director whose impact on both the world of the visual arts and influence on a generation of choreographers cannot be overstated. The works express a fragility and a humanity that is a perfect example of the value of experience, and ideally suited to a group of dancers that bring with them their own abundant histories and knowledge. In the act of stripping away all artifice and theatricality, the beauty and truth of wisdom is confronted, shared, and exposed.

Production: Dance On/DIEHL+RITTER
Co-production: STUK. House for Dance, Image and Sound /Münchner Kammerspiele
Funded by the Doppelpass Fund of the German Federal Cultural Foundation

 

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