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Posts from the ‘Inceleme / Review’ Category

Oct 19

A dance-time-machine

Theresa Steininger

A Mary Wigman Dance Evening has brought the choreographies of the founder of the German Ausdruckstanz to today´s stage.

Why would a young man today dance solos that a 43-year old woman had done in early 30ies? Do we already need a living dance museum of modern dance, as Martha-Graham-Company-leader Janet Eibler suggested in an interview concerning her dancers` tour to Austria? If yes, young Ecuadorian dancer Fabian Barba, currently working in Brussels, can join it. He has put together an evening reconstructing important choreographies by Mary Wigman, founder of the German Ausdruckstanz. In his „A Mary Wigman Dance Evening“, he offers the audience the possibility to go back in history, also having the aim not only to copy and reconstruct, but to build something of his own. The difficulty of such a time-machine-performance is that the audience will more likely see the evening as a chance to imagine Mary Wigman dancing in front of them, not so much concentrating on the elements Barba has brought in.

So you surely will come up with the question if this evening is a creation or a carrying out. The audience will certainly notice how accurate Barba brings in typical elements of Wigman, but not see it so much as a creation of Barba´s.

In what concerns this accuracy, Barba has really worked very precisely. He has perfectioned Wigmans way of gliding, he has studied very accurately how she used breath for her choreographies, he brings in the praying hands in „Anruf“, the snake-like arm in „Gesicht der Nacht“, the strong and flowing arm-movements in „Sturmlied“. He has the costums, playing a huge role in Wigman´s solos. From the program, you may learn that Barba has worked with videos as well as with former students of Wigman, he has prepared very precisely. But when after each solo, he copies Wigman´s very self-confident, almost arrogant way to bow, you cannot be sure any longer, if he is just copying or ironizising it. A strange taste also remains, when until one of the last pieces, nobody gives an applause when Barba bows.

When you see this performance, you can sometimes not be totally sure if it is Barba or Wigman performing. If this was the performer´s aim, he has surely come up to it.

Theresa Steininger

Oct 19

Anat Eisenberg and Mirko Winkel – Life and Strive

Maxime Fleuriot

Life and Strive is not a play nor a performance. It’s an orginal artistic proposition made by two young artists Anat Eisenberg and Mirko Winkel for a limited group of people (around 15 persons). The public meet the two artists on the top floor of a luxury hotel in the center of Istanbul. There, in front of the city view, the two artists explain their project : they show the biggest tower of the city to the audience, a residential project which construction is about to be completed. They invite the public to visit the apartements, pretending they are interested in buying one. And so it goes. Divided in two small groups, the members of the public are brought there in a van an soon go through a visit of apartments which they will never be able to afford (the prices range between 1.2 million dollars and seven million). Everything here is big and made for the richest : the view is breathtaking, the apartments are huge ; a golf, a swimming pool and a supermarket are under construction. What makes many people dream of discloses many terryfying aspects : the tower has everything of a golden cage. The view is breathtaking but no one can open a window ! What is interesting in this situation is that the members of the public are pretending. This self distance increases the feeling one has that everything that is seen and heard in this building project is fake (the building, the salesmen…). Unfortunately it is not. The role of the artists in Life and Strive is quite limited : they put the public in a situation they just chose. Difficult to call that a piece or a performance. But the content of it is interesting enough to be worth it.

Oct 19

A Mary Wigman dance evening by Fabián Barba

Martina Rösler

In A Mary Wigman dance evening, the young Ecuadorian choreographer Fabián Barba is dealing with the “historic” figure Mary Wigman, one of the pioneers of expressionistic dance in Europe. He graduated from P.A.R.T.S. (Brussels) in 2006 with a first version of his occupation with Mary Wigman. For this performance Barba chose nine solos out of the dance cycleShifting Landscape (1929) as well as parts from Visions(1928,1925) and Celebration (1926) and put them together.

A playbill in the style of the 1930’s, two crystal chandeliers, a red nostalgic curtain, as well as delicate background music are trying to create an atmosphere that aims to bring the audience back to the original event. The constant changing of light and black (which also means light in the auditorium), defines the structure of the evening. One solo after the other is presented to the audience, followed by taking a deep bow after each short dance.

Taking a closer look at the movement quality, the following words occur to me: rhythmical swinging of the body, strong and powerful gestures, changing of tensions, turning, body weight and gravity, expanding in space throughout the materiality of the costume. The whole pathos and emotionalism seems nowadays quite overacted and excessive, but the way how Barba is performing makes it possible for the spectator to overcome this first sensation. The fact that a male body is representing an original female body is also changing the spectators gaze.

As written in the program, Barba is trying to breath new life into some of the dances of Mary Wigman. But can an absent body which is not available anymore be revitalised? In that regard the problematic of re-enactment becomes an issue. Questions concerning authorship and the affiliation between the original and the copy arise immediately. In addition to using photographs, fragments of video recordings, texts as his research source, Barba also worked with contemporary witnesses Katharine Sehnert, Irene Sieben and Susanne Linke. The process of reconstruction can also be considered as a process of communication. Barba presents a detailed, serious and accurate reconstruction of Wigmans solos, but maybe there is a lack of an attempt to translate and transfer the original into the context of contemporary dance and art today.

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Oct 19

Failing the invisible theatre

Iulia Popovici

Istanbul Sapphire is a residential building in the heart of the city’s business area. A block of flats. It’s high – “the highest residential building in Turkey and in the whole Europe” (it has 54 floors), covered in glass, remarkably ugly and equally expensive. It’s a future gated community, where the owners will have exclusive access. Only potential buyers are allowed inside, to visit some of the common areas, the furnished model apartment on the 33rd floor and the terrace on the top of the building. So two artists – Anat Eisenberg and Mirko Winkel, both living and working mainly in Germany – decided that the audience to their newest project, Live and Strive, should assume the role of potential buyers in order to have access to Istanbul Sapphire – and a number of other upper class residential projects, as a matter of fact.

The real-estate agent doesn’t know who these seven (eight?) people are. We know the situation is not genuine, we know we are performing roles. It could be the ideal condition for a performance of invisible theatre (a form of socially-engaged theatre developed by the late Augusto Boal, meant to emulate reality in order to raise consciousness towards social inequities) except for the fact that the participants are not professional actors, there is no script and no consciousness involved. (But yes, there was a moral/ ethical issue: why misleading the otherwise honest real-estate agent? Just to expose the secret life of rich people?) Even if the potential of the theme is quite generous: living in a building like Istanbul Sapphire resembles to waking up, every day, in a jar (a 1.2 to 7.3 million dollars per apartment jar), with the perspective of never leaving it, going in your slippers 30 floors downstairs in order to spend your evening in front of a TV with other several bored nouveaux riches and socializing with the guy bringing you the food ordered from the restaurant some other 30 floors below. The newest technology and a pointless existence – in his movies, Jacques Tati described it better than anyone else.

If the text you’ve just read looks more like a society column in a more or less socialist-liberal newspaper, it’s because the Live and Strive experience of the author herself was least of all a performative one. But maybe ethical challenges are part of everybody’s personal dramaturgy of the self.

Oct 10

Fabian Barba – A Mary Wigman Dance Evening

Lise Smith

A silver-clad figure struts across the stage, hands akimbo, to the sound of Chinese gongs. Ecuadorian dance artist Fabian Barba is performing an evening of solos by Mary Wigman based on her first tour of the United States, and the effect is uncanny – Barba inhabits not only Wigman’s choreography but her costumes, her delicate hand gestures, and her somewhat mannered facial expressions.

The performance comments on the enactment of a feminine persona on stage, but Barba resists the urge to camp it up. Dressed in female costume (but not in drag – he has shaved neither leg nor torso hair and wears no makeup) Barba enacts the graceful hip shifts and wrist flicks of Wigman’s short solos, effectively becoming the choreographer herself for the duration of the performance. The material is shown cabaret-style, with a costume change and a musical intermission between each piece, immersing the audience in the chandelier-lit 1930s ambience of the setting.

The movement palette is minimal; Wigman/Barba favours simple stepping patterns up and down the stage, shaping the space with liquid arms and hand flourishes that often appear oriental or tribal. One striking sequence,Sturmlied, features the performer in a diaphanous red cape covering the face, whirling the fabric through the air like dust in a sandstorm. FinaleDrehmonotonie finds Barba circling incessantly about the centre, pacing the stage like a caged beast in a silver ballgown.

Special mention must go to Sarah-Christine Reuleke for her loving recreations of Wigman’s costumes, a procession of backless silk gowns, Egyptian-inspired wraps and elegant shawls that are as fascinating to watch as the choreography itself.

Strange and oddly-mannered at first, the Wigman style has by the end of the performance become familiar, the final encore welcome. Just as Barba takes on the persona of Wigman in his enactment of her choreography, so we in the audience, gradually warming towards this unaccustomed style, become identified with her earlier audiences. This thoughtful, multi-layered recreation reveals the performance as not mere historical artefact but as a constant and living process refracted through both audience and performer.

Posted by LiseS

May 29

Boynum Kıldan İnce / Güncel Sanatta Belgesel Pratikleri

Özge Ersoy, www.boltart.net

Bir ikilemle karşı karşıyayız. Bir yandan, belgesel niteliği taşıyan çalışmalara büyük anlamlar yüklüyor ve tek yönlü bilgi akışı talep ediyoruz. Diğer yandan ise, arşivlerin ve belgelerin gerçekliğine duyduğumuz güven giderek azalıyor. Buna bağlı olarak, yazılı metinlerin ya da fotoğrafların hangi koşullarda tarihi belge özelliği kazandığı tartışma konusu. Yazılı ya da görsel dökümanlara belgesel değer biçme yetkisi kime ait? Arşiv oluşturmak ne anlama geliyor? Tarih nasıl yazılıyor? Bu sorulara aranan cevaplar 1990’ların başından itibaren güncel sanat üretiminde sıkça yer bulmaya başladı. Lübnan asıllı sanatçı Walid Raad ve Atlas Grubu’nun My Neck is Thinner than A Hair: Engines (Boynum Kıldan İnce: Motorlar) yerleştirmesi (1996-2004) de bu sorular etrafında şekilleniyor.

Boynum Kıldan İnce: Motorlar, 1975-1991 yılları arasındaki Lübnan iç savaşında bombayla patlatılan araçları gösteren yüz adet siyah beyaz fotoğraftan oluşuyor. Fotoğraflar patlatılan araçlardan geriye kalan tek parça olan motorları ve bunları çevreleyen merak dolu bakışları izleyiciye aktarmakta. Bu çalışma, Walid Raad tarafından 1999′da kurulan Atlas Grubu’nun Lübnan iç savaşının ekonomik, siyasi, sosyolojik ve ruhsal sonuçları üzerine halen sürdürdüğü araştırmasının bir parçası. Read more

May 29

Speaking of Time

Noémie Solomon

Speaking Dance
Jonathan Burrows & Matteo Fargion

Do these two dancers share the same time, or do they hold to their own time? What are the benefits of sharing time, and what are the benefits of ignoring each other’s time?
-Jonathan Burrows

Sitting next to each other, the two dancers begin as suddenly as deliberately. “Right. Left. Right. Left. Right.Left.RightLeftRightLeft…” The spoken words alternate, overlap, brush against each other; they create subtle and complex tempos, speeds and rhythms. “Right Left Right Left Right Left Right Stop.” In a constant play with each other’s time, and with that of the audience, the synchronized utterances arise in distinct yet ever shifting patterns, creating instances of singular melodies, of joyous dissonance, of cadenced silences.

Speaking Dance (2006) is the third opus marking a fruitful collaboration in which Jonathan Burrows and Matteo Fargion astutely explore through a series of intimate duets the intersections between dance and music, composition and temporality. Their thoughtful and humorous meditations operate at the frontier between the virtual and the actual; perception and the imaginary. If the first two pieces — Both Sitting Duet (2002) and Quiet Dance (2005) — dealt mostly with the dancing gesture and systems of movement, Speaking Dance is primarily concerned with the verbal gesture. Throughout the piece, the two performers create a series of minute and complex rhythms with the use of banal words and speech acts. Proposing singular modalities of composition and of attitudes towards time, Burrows and Fargion then astutely work to modify, vary and recompose them, playing incessantly with the interaction and perception of time. The dance thus speaks to the spectator’s expectations, expanding a possible range of responses. These experimentations not only blur the musical and choreographic score, but explore temporal lapses that activate new perceptive mechanisms and leaps into the imaginary. As it take hold of speeds, ruptures and slowness, this meticulous spectacle of choreographed polyphony shapes an accumulation of meanings, a dispersion of language.

Embodying a thoughtful balance between rigor and casualness, banality and virtuosity, the performance shapes itself through a series of expressive acts. Filled with “linguistic gesticulations,” the choreography radically refigures what dance can be; its structure, essence and perhaps most importantly its mode of interaction with music. Rhythm, which emerges as the proportion of motion, re-imagines the manifold relations between dance and music. Opening possibilities for multiples ways of interacting, for an equal and fruitful dialogue, this play of rhythm across words and movements counters our assumption of the flow of time. Rhythm arises not as a formal alternating, but rather as an alternative organization of the dancing subject. What Speaking Dance thus proposes is a performative dancing body figuring itself via rhythmic gestures. Rhythm here speaks of dance as intimacy, friendship, temporality or absurdity; of dance as joyous mode of arrhythmia.

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