Isabelle Schad / Good Work Productions

Conception and design: Ben Anderson, Hanna Hedman, Bruno Pocheron and Isabelle Schad.

Performance: Hanna Hedman, Bruno Pocheron and Isabelle Schad.

Soundtrack: Rut Waldeyer / Thomas Charbonnel.

Coaching: Frederic Gies.

California Roll’s visual foundation is a landscape, shaped and sculptured from thrown-out clothes collected from various suburbs in Berlin that extensively ‘house’ the performers, giving them different degrees of appearance or disappearance. These clothes (i.e., discarded trends that were due to be sorted and exported to places and people in the world in the need of clothing) are now organized in space by colors and become a composite esthetic object as well as an ‘exported place’ for the performance.

California Roll proposes an alternation of images associated to naturalistic soundscapes (rain, wind and storms - conditions of nature) and cinematographic soundtracks. The performers play the game of being or not affected by these conditions. They compose movement sequences that ‘pattern’ the colored landscape of clothes which they shape and reshape individually and collectively towards their own notions of space(s) and place(s). The sequences are repeated, revisited, altered by some changes of parameters: the performance moves as a continuous transference in shifts of intentions, shifts of reactions and hints of narration. The repetitive construction of the piece proposes the spectator to reconstruct along the way her/his own perceptive experience.

California Roll uses the references of various classical paintings and contemporary mediated body-icons relocated in the scenery. These references are constituting within the structure of the piece a series of esthetic landmarks that propose the performing body as a communicative device. The emergence and the transformations of the classical figure in the modern body operate seamlessly between desire and pathos towards an amalgamated ‘style’ reflecting the ‘inter-place’ and ‘inter-spaces’ of body imagery.

Co-production: TanzWerkstatt Berlin / Tanz im August 2004, Monty Antwerpen / Amperdans, Fonds Darstellende Künste, Voxxx Chemnitz, MimeCentrum Berlin.

Vielen Dank an das Deutsche Rote Kreuz Spandau.