overview

DER BAU - GRUPPE12x60

Berlin, Uferstudios
Premiere and performances 06.-09.02.2014

In 2012 Berlin Choreographer Isabelle Schad and French artist Laurent Goldring created their currently touring piece Der Bau (invited a.o. to this year’s German Dance Platform), for which Kafka’s unfinished novella of the same title has been serving as an inspiration source. Starting from the description of an animal’s burrow as a metaphor for the body, with its organs and secretions, they have been investigating the space of the stage as an organ. The labyrinth described by Kafka as a space deriving from the body itself, yet still belonging to it becomes the basis for their explorations of conceiving this new relationship between body and space that they have started with their series of pieces Unturtled in 2008.

Form and Mass, a solo Isabelle Schad created in 2013 for and with Sonja Pregrad, examines the relation between energy and matter, between material and movement, and the subsequent emergence of form. The material - black bags filled with polystyrene beads - serves as an amplifier towards visibility: it elongates the body into its surrounding space.

60 of those black bags are the material used in the new group piece Der Bau - Group12x60, which continues the new perspective on choreographing inner / outer space. The material movement of a group of 12 performers creates a space travel that dwells between paradoxal landscapes, pure energetic matter, abstract painting and moving sculpture. A black phantasmagorical mass invades little by little the space of the stage allowing the spectator’s eye to dive into a journey of surprises, desires and fantasies...

picture logo: Laurent Goldring


Announcement at GANZ Festival Zagreb:

We are watching a metamorphosis of a huge monster which occasionally spurts out hands, heads, legs constantly battling with its giant fluidity. Material movement of the group of performers creates a spatial journey set somewhere between paradoxical landscapes, abstract images and moving sculptures. During more than one hour, we follow them to exhaustion while they discover each and every possibility of dealing with those objects: from investigating their form, discovering the softness of their content and listening to their sound, to more expansive attempts at animating them through repeated energy waves that create and destroy the imaginary landscapes.

Isabelle_The beanbags seemed interesting to me, as the amount of small styrofoam balls could be brought in relation to the ingredients of the body – we are made of trillions of cells as the smallest imaginable units. In this performance, beanbags function as an additional layer of the body – as an organ so to speak, and as a transitional object (one extra layer between the body and the world).

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