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Close by, So far – Landscapes of Infinity

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Close by, So far – Landscapes of Infinity is an oscillation between detail and vastness. It is born from a desire for healing in an age of crisis. 

Inspired by examples from literature such as The Woman in the Dunes, by Kobo Abe, or The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin, where landscapes are metaphors for utopian lives / societies, and from periods in art history where desire, dreams and the act of seeing beyond reason play an important role (Romanticism to Surrealism, Cubism and beyond), the work asks where the self begins and ends, where the sense of a life includes a before and an after.

Imbued with shiatsu and healing practices, on our sensitivities and sensual experiences, this work is opposition and proposition. It longs to break down binary ways of being, seeing and moving in and on the world. It leans towards a space for resilience, a space that matters more than ever, as much as any encounter we can be aware of.

Originally conceived as a double portrait of Viviana Defazio and David Kummer, the work plays with triangulations, appearances (Arantxa Martinez, Alessandra Defazio) and replacements, weaving ideas of who we think we are, of who we can be, perceive or recognize, considering reality as a mirror and web of infinite connections.

The work is an interplay of moving and being moved, self and other with all their intermediate forms. It explores the potential of the relationship established within a shiatsu treatment, where all separations of body and mind, reason and emotion, self and other, thoughtful reflection and emptiness start to blend into the larger entity and force that makes us move and exist.

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Close by, So far – Landscapes of Infinity ist eine Oszillation zwischen Detail und Weite, geboren aus der Sehnsucht nach Kontemplation und Heilung im Zeitalter der Krise. 

Inspiriert durch literarische Werke wie  The Woman in the Dunes, by Kobo Abe, oder The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin, in denen weite Landschaften als Metaphern für ein utopische/s Leben / Gesellschaft stehen, und durch Epochen der Kunstgeschichte, in denen Landschaften in Relation zu Sehnsucht, Träumen und dem Akt des Sehens jenseits des reinen Verstandes stehen (von der Romantik bis zum Surrealismus, Kubismus und darüber hinaus), fragt die Arbeit, wo das Selbst beginnt und wo es endet, wo der Sinn des Lebens ein Vorher und Danach mit einschließt.

Close by, So far ist Opposition und Vorschlag zugleich: Wir bestehen auf unserer Empfindsamkeit, unserer sinnlichen Erfahrung und unserer choreographisch-energetischen Praxis. Wir wenden uns gegen binäre Formen des Seins, Sehens und Bewegens in und auf dieser Welt: Ein Raum des Widerstands wird mehr denn je gebraucht, die Bedeutung jeder einzelnen bewussten Begegnung ist relevanter denn je.

Das ursprünglich als Doppelportrait für Viviana Defazio and David Kummer konzipierte Stück erweitert sich im Verlauf, in dem mit Triangulierungen, Erscheinungen, Doppelungen (Arantxa Martinez, Alessandra Defazio) und einem ständigen Tausch der Rollen gespielt wird und so die Idee dessen, wer wir sind, glauben zu sein, wahrnehmen oder erkennen zu können, infrage gestellt wird. Die Realität wird zum Spiegel, zum Netz endloser Verbindungen.

Die Arbeit entfaltet sich im Spannungsfeld von Bewegen und Bewegt werden, Selbst und andere/r, Eigenem und Fremden und all ihren hybriden Zwischenformen. Sie erforscht das Potenzial jener Beziehung, die sich während einer Shiatsu Behandlung herstellt: wo jede Trennung zwischen Körper und Geist, Verstand und Emotion, Selbst und Andere/r, Gedanken und Leere aufgehoben wird und zu einer größeren Einheit und Kraft verschmilzt; jener, die uns bewegt und existieren lässt.

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Künstlerische Leitung, Konzept, Choreografie: Isabelle Schad
Co-Choreografie, Tanz: Viviana Defazio, David Kummer, Arantxa Martinez, Alessandra Defazio
Komposition, Sound: Damir Simunovic
Lichtdesign: Bruno Pocheron
Kostümassistenz: likabari

Social Media, Grafik der Broschüre: Rike Nölting

Beratung Relaxed Performance: Leo Naomi Baur
PR, Vermittlung: Elena Basteri
Produktionsleitung: Heiko Schramm

Eine Produktion von Isabelle Schad in Koproduktion mit Sophiensæle. Gefördert durch die Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhalt Berlin. Unterstützt durch Wiesen55 e.V. Medienpartner: Missy Magazine, Siegessäule, taz.

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Images: Mayra Wallraff, all rights reserved

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Images 1 -18: Dieter Hartwig, all rights reserved

Images 19 -22: Mayra Wallraff, all rights reserved

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Isabelle Schad: A double bill of doubling humanity
08.04.2025, Stream , von Lea Pischke
On two subsequent nights, first in the front row snuggled up in a bean bag, then seated high up in the ranks near the technician’s desk, Lea Pischke is audience to the double bill Bodies of Light and Close by so far – Landscapes of Infinity by choreogapher Isabelle Schad. The former stands in a long line of portraits, the latter enters new choreographic territory, yet both work with a unique sense of energy exchange and a highly political form of personhood.

When you have the rare pleasure to see the same set of shows twice in a row, you will be stunned by the range and variety of impressions a single stage production can provoke one night after another, with the choreography, scenography or sound design being hardly touched.

The double bill in question consists of Bodies of Light and Close by so far – Landscapes of Infinity, both creations by Berlin-based choreographer Isabelle Schad.
A study of the human form, arranged as a double-portrait Bodies of Light has the performers Yen Lee and Claudia Tomasi casually step on an arrangement of black tatamis, splitting the stage into two distinct islands and anchored by a large dark curtain attached to the theatre’s back wall. Both scenography and costume design, marked by Schad’s signature sobriety, have black as their dominant colour. Nothing, so it seems, should interfere with the stage action where details, texture, light levels and rhythm play a prominent role.

Once on the mats, the two performers engage in a rapid sequence of arm and shoulder movements, repeated through the lateral swing of their torsos. By holding their elbows with their hands, the performers create a V-shape above their heads that keeps going back and forth like a swivel in a piece of machinery. Other variations follow. A rhythm settles in and a quiet, yet steady flow of energy is being spread towards the audience.
With every iteration, every performer’s placement change, the spectators’ perception loosens its grip on the human shape, on the “legs-at-the-bottom-hips-then-torso-with-head-at-the-top” paradigm. The focus shifts elsewhere, towards single body parts, their texture, their faculties and own presence.
The performers eventually sit down and roll the legs of their trousers up to their knees. Their shins appear and shimmer in the soft light. Hands rest on knees and an “intra-bodily” communication develops between their feet, lower legs, knees, elbows and arms.

At this point the piece’s costume design plays itself out to the fullest: the performers are clothed in a black shirt and a pair of black trousers, the fabric soft, strikingly plain and highly light absorbent. Yet, they help the performers blend in with the overall darkness of the scenography, and then – by blocking out the view of some parts of the body – direct the audience’s attention to select parts of the performer’s body, very much akin to the barn shutters of a stage light. In doing so, the plain dark clothes give a very restricted, yet highly focussed view on them, their texture, their action.
This effect is strengthened by light technician Bruno Pocheron’s highly crafted lighting design, subtly playing the gamut from white to rose and orange at varying degrees of luminosity, shrouding the performer’s body shape at times with contours that appear drawn into space with a fine ink pen, to then suffuse them back into twilight.

The process is accompanied by a subtle soundscape of dark trickles created by composer Damir Šimunović. The trickles are augmented at times by a performer’s arm swipe on the floor which must be discretely picked up by a contact microphone underneath a tatami mat.

The work Bodies of Light stands in a series of portraits, Isabelle Schad has been creating over the course of several years, and is in direct lineage with Solo für Lea mit Claudia which premiered at Sophiensäle back in 2016. Here like then, we engage in constellations of forming and disfiguring, where the specifics of the performer’s body take on centre stage, its uniqueness emerging through an array of laboured movement motifs and patterns.

In Bodies of Light, we’ll find a distant echo of Différence et Répétition a work by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze [i] from 1968. In Schad’s portraits repetition acts as a choreographic tool that helps emerge a form of human identity which comprises both resemblance and distinction. No body is the same in Schad’s work and still, the body is everyone’s, universally unique. Repetition helps for difference to be seen: the body becomes alien, and by becoming alien, it becomes truly itself.

The piece arrives at its end in a cascading of head hair that Lee and Tomasi repeatedly whip up in the air with both their hands. Thighs engaged, little steps to have one or the other be in the foreground, we witness these spikes of energy being shot into every direction until the lights go out.

After a twenty minutes break for a quick set change, Close by so far – Landscapes of Infinity unfolds, with a similarly unpretentious, matter-of-factly presentation of affairs to that of Bodies of Light.
The dancers David Kummer and Viviana Defazio, dressed in plain clothes, sit on five large fabric bands which are suspended at the top of the stage’s back wall, covering the stage floor and stretching well into the audience’s first row like an oversized flag. The colours are soft and earthy: beige, grey and light brown to ochre.
Defazio rests on her back, Kummer kneels behind her, gently kneading and twisting her raised right arm.

Despite a certain kinship in terms of sober aesthetics with Bodies of Light, we enter an entirely different terrain in Close by, so far. The stage is fully lit, no focus is being re-directed. It is at the spectator’s discretion to navigate from action to action, of which there are many on stage: rolling, gentle stretches, observations, interventions, duets, trios, quartets.

The movement vocabulary has its roots in Shiatsu, a Japanese healing practice of gentle manipulation: we see how performers touch each other, caringly: One lifts up a white sheet for the other to lean into like in a comfortable deckchair. Bodies are being stretched, joints are opened, energies released. There’s a certain fluency in the performers’ gestures that reaches beyond Shiatsu’s own hand and body placement repertoire, and moves towards a communication through touch which colours the dancers’ interactions on stage.

Some words have to be said about the presence of performers Arantxa Martínez and Alessandra Defazio. From the very beginning of the piece, Martínez sits on a black folding chair at the very back of the stage, undresses quietly and reaches the fabric bands – centre stage – in a state of complete nudity. She is the only one – to one single exception towards the end of the piece – who remains mostly nude, while taking over Alessandra Defazio’s arm movement for instance, or observing quietly from the edges of the stage.

Martínez is the “body”, a physical reference. For Close by so far – Landscapes of Infinity she acts as a sort of female version of Le Corbusier’s “modulor” [ii], a reminder that we are all, underneath our layers of clothes, fabric, make-up and hair-do, a composition of bones and skin, that we all have energies inside us which sometimes move, sometimes get stuck.

It is thanks to Martínez’ particular stage presence that we never drift off into other realms of association when we witness her nudity. She walks on stage, determined, present, but not overly self-conscious, at ease, but not eager to show. We appreciate her interventions like a peak into the “every-body” that lies within us, her particular version of being herself harmoniously coexistent to other versions of being oneself.

Alessandra Defazio’s role is different. Fully dressed, appearing and disappearing from behind the suspended sheets, highly active in her movements, at times doubling up with her twin sister, dancer Viviana Defazio, she seems to be the “you”.
More direct than Martínez, her interactions stretch into the audience as much as the laid out sheets: “I am you, and you are me. I am different and I am similar. We are singular and we are kin.” The soundscape is rich, marked by an instability and sudden changes, if not to say rushing from scene to scene: there’s the sound of blowing wind, exhalations of a human voice, static enmeshed with a small violin motif.

In Close by so far – Landscapes of Infinity, the subject of personhood is handled differently than in Bodies of Light. Here, the exchange between the performers is not only energetic, but also social: there are gazes, smiles, there are intentions towards each other: performer Alessandra Defazio watches the other three moving, all the while being comfortably stretched out on the floor, propped up on her elbow. Viviana Defazio and David Kummer duet in a cheeky arm throw that has Kummer hop and Defazio pose. Another moment sees Martínez, changed into light-coloured trousers, comment the treatments with the scraping sound of a cabasa.
Schad’s work is political, but it is a politicalness which foregoes raised fists, petitions and pamphlets. The affirmation is elsewhere: when watching Bodies of Light and Close by so far – Landscapes of Infinity, the absence of ego in the performers can be strikingly felt, and it is this very absence which paves the way to another understanding of being oneself: “I am unique, but my uniqueness doesn’t exclude others. It exists and is dependent through others.”
This realisation leads me to the multiple definitions of “Ubuntu”, a concept of self and being in the world which has its origins with the Bantu people in South, Central and East Africa.
According to Nigerian scholar Michael Onyebuchi Eze, the core of Ubuntu can be described as follows:
“A person is a person through other people strikes an affirmation of one’s humanity through recognition of an “other” in his or her uniqueness and difference. It is a demand for a creative intersubjective formation in which the “other” becomes a mirror (but only a mirror) for my subjectivity. This idealism suggests to us that humanity is not embedded in my person solely as an individual; my humanity is co-substantively bestowed upon the other and me. Humanity is a quality we owe to each other. We create each other and need to sustain this otherness creation. And if we belong to each other, we participate in our creations: we are because you are, and since you are, definitely I am. The “I am” is not a rigid subject, but a dynamic self-constitution dependent on this otherness creation of relation and distance.”[iii]

Schad values the human body in all its particularities and qualities, its capacity to be both alien and familiar. In so doing, she is keen to see energies shared amongst the performers and the spectators, based on a deep understanding that – without exception – all human beings are elements of a larger ecosystem, where we all give and receive in equal measures, unique and connected that we are.

[i] Différence et Répétitions. Gilles Deleuze, Presses universitaires de France (PUF), 1968.
[ii] The Modulor is an anthropometric scale of proportions devised by the Swiss-born French architect Le Corbusier (1887–1965). It is based on the height of a man with his arm raised, similar to the “Vitruvian Man”. The Modulor considered the standard human height as 1.83 m, ignoring female measures. It was used as a referential system for a number of Le Corbusier’s buildings (Cité Radieuse in Marseille) and was later codified into two books.
[iii] Intellectual History in Contemporary South Africa. M. O. Eze, London, Palgrave, 2010 pp. 190–191

Isabelle Schad zeigt zu Skulpturen modellierte Körper

Zwischen Tanz und Bildender Kunst: Die Berliner Choreografin präsentiert an den Sophiensaelen ein Doppel mit einer neuen Arbeit.
03.04.2025, Berliner Morgenpost , von Elena Philipp

Körperskulpturen auf der Bühne: Das sagt sich über Tanz so leicht. Und trifft auf die Kunst des Bewegungsflusses eher selten zu – zumal im zeitgenössischen Tanz, dem Antipoden zu den still gestellten Posen des klassischen Balletts. Auf die Arbeiten von Isabelle Schad aber passt der Begriff der Skulptur ideal. Körper sind für die Berliner Choreografin Rohmaterial, aus dem sie Formen herauspräpariert – Muskelstränge treten in Dehnungen hervor, in wiederholten Drehungen wird die Scharnierfunktion von Gelenken ansichtig, und wenn sie nackte Rücken im Scheinwerferlicht inszeniert, dann wirken die Knochenstrukturen wie von einer Bildhauerin gestaltet. 2019 erhielt Schad im Rahmen des Deutschen Tanzpreises eine Ehrung für herausragende künstlerische Entwicklungen im zeitgenössischen  Tanz.

An den Sophiensaelen ist jetzt ein Doppel ihrer Arbeiten zu sehen, als Relaxed Performance mit gelockerten Aufenthaltsregeln. „Bodies of Light“, erstmals 2022 gezeigt, entspricht der Ästhetik, die Schad in den letzten Jahrzehnten entwickelt hat. Zwei Frauenkörper werden live im Scheinwerferlicht modelliert. Zu Beginn drehen Claudia Tomasi und Yen Lee minutenlang ihren Oberkörper hin und her, die ineinander gelegten Arme über den Kopf reckend, stets nur in Rückenansicht zu sehen. Bald entledigen sie sich ihrer schwarzen Kleidung. Im Sitzen wringen sie mit minimalen Bewegungen, die den gesamten Torso ergreifen, ihre Schulterblätter um die Wirbelsäule. Dann wieder drücken sie in Seitlage eine Faust in den Boden, während der restliche Körper wie in Wellenbewegungen diesem Druck folgt. Wirbel treten hervor, Pobacken runden sich wie in Man Rays Fotografie „Le Violon d’Ingres“, Leiber wirken marmorglatt wie Statuen und doch weich wie Knetmasse. Künstlerisch-analytische Aktdarstellungen zeigt „Bodies of Light“, wie man sie von Isabelle Schad kennt. In der Premiere „Close by, So far – Landscapes of Infinity“ deutet sich ein neuer Strang in ihrer Bewegungsforschung an. Narrativer wirkt die Abfolge von Sequenzen, die erneut mit den Soundscapes von Damir Simunovic unterlegt sind. Leises Schluchzen erklingt über dem Wehen von Wind, vielleicht ist es nur rhythmisches Atmen. Ambient-Puckern wird von hollywoodesken Melodiepartikeln abgelöst, leise verweht. Über gedeckt farbigen Stoffbahnen, die die Patina des Sophiensaele-Festsaals aufnehmen und deren Farbpalette sich in den Kostümen von likabari wiederfindet, bewegen sich erst zwei, dann vier Performende. Gedeckt ist auch die Stimmungslage, „Close by, So far“ möchte ein Antidot zur gegenwärtigen Krisenstimmung bieten und ist dabei vor allem das meditative Versenken in eine Tanzpraxis, die so spezialisiert ist, dass sie bisweilen hermetisch wirkt. Zwei Romane nennt Isabelle Schad als Inspiration, „Die Frau in den Dünen“ von Kobo Abe und „Die linke Hand der Dunkelheit“ von Ursula K. Le Guin. In beiden Texten kämpfen die Figuren gegen unermessliche Landschaften, bei Abe in einer Sandgrube, die ein Dorf zu verschütten droht, und bei Le Guin in den Eiswüsten eines fernen Planeten. Von diesem Ringen ist bei der Premiere noch wenig zu sehen, die Amplitude der Atmosphären bleibt gleichförmig flach. Aber da Isabelle Schad an all ihren Stücken stetig weiterarbeitet, bis sie ihren Rhythmus gefunden haben, erhofft man sogleich ein Wiedersehen mit „Close by, So far – Landscapes of Infinity“ in zwei, drei Jahren.

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03.04.2025 | Sophiensaele Berlin

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Isabelle Schad – Notes of the artist