As part of the three weeks long performative research residency at the Art Stations Foundation, Ben J. Riepe and an international team of performers are creating an unrecognized space: UUUUU(topia). A performative installation, their work features a dimmed landscape, inviting visitors to rest and surrender themselves to forgetting; a place in which beauty and all things happy and paradaisiac can manifest themselves in numerous ways. The land devised at Studio Słodownia +3 thus constitutes a tangible, sensual transformative space filled with dance, music and song. Miraculous sounds and moments of choral harmony endow it with the ambience of a utopian community. Through this microcosm of meetings and shared experience, we establish a utopian (social) space centred around the body ? the resonating body and the body in which the community finds its place.
The performance will be presented on 4-5 November 2016 (7 m), while the installation will be exhibited on 5 November from 3 m to 6 m. Admission to the installation is free.
UUUUU(topia). Choreograhing atmospheres is a continuation of Ben J. Riepe?s research on body, music and landscape, whereby the particular focus is placed on the Eastern European variant of throat singing, the so called ?White Voice Singing?. The practice serves as a starting point for an examination of bodies and sounds, presence and ephemerality
?It is about the remodeling of the world to a home, a place that all men have glimpsed in childhood; a place and a state in which no one has yet been.? (Ernst Bloch: The Principle of Hope)
The works of the German artist Ben J. Riepe fluently shift from choreography to visual arts. His choreographies encompass much more than mere sets of dancing bodies: his art is a sensual experience which establishes an empirical space for his audiences, enabling them to partake in the emotional process and shared reflection. Ben J. Riepe always strives to facilitate his audiences in communal, non-verbal experience, on which escapes cognition and discourse; he also pursues an aesthetic transposition of rational constructs, emotional layers of reality and ways of experiencing and perceiving them onto a shared space. Text, music, image and experience, lighting, objects, motion and space engage in a tense relationship which can be explored and reshaped within the frame of each new project.
choreography, stage design, sound design: Ben J. Riepe
performers: Laura Burgener, Lenah Flaig, Simon Hartmann, Karolina Kraczkowska, Sudeep Kumar Puthiyaparambath, Ola Osowicz and Weronika Pelczyńska
assistant choreographer: Gwen Wieczorek
guttural song instructor: Katarzyna Sitarz
objects: ensemble
sound: Kerim Karaoglu
organisation: Izaskun Abrego / Mikołaj Maciejewski (Art Stations Foundation)
executive producer (Poznań): Julia Stryjska-Banaszak
communication: Susanne Ruprecht
documentation: Bianca Bachmann, Okba Hzeem
UUUUU(topia) is a Production of the Ben J. Riepe Company, in co-production with the NRW Forum Dusseldorf , Art Stations Foundation by Grazyna Kulczyk in Poznann and Goethe-Institute Warsaw. Sponsored by the ministry for families, children, youth, culture and sports of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, the art foundation of NRW, the culture department of the state capital Dusseldorf, the NATIONALE PERFORMANCE NETZ (NPN) ; additional co-production funding: Dance from funds of the commissioners of the federal government for culture and media on the basis of a decision of the German Bundestag, as well as through the arts and culture foundation of the Sparkasse Dusseldorf. With kind support from Jülich research center.
UUUUU(topia) is a project in the frame of the Polish-German anniversary year 2016 WE?RE CELEBRATING! organized by the Goethe-Institut and the German Embassy in Warsaw for the 25th anniversary of the Treaty on Good Neighbourship and Friendly Cooperation. www.goethe.de/swietujemy