Collective Jumps. Photo: Jakub Wittchen. Courtesy of Art Stations Foundation by Grażyna Kulczyk.
On Sunday, 14 December at 7 pm Poznań’s Old Brewery New Dance (Słodownia + 3) is going to present the premiere of Collective Jumps, a choreography prepared by Isabelle Schad with Polish dancers to mark the finale of Old Brewery New Dance’s jubilee year. The piece by Berlin-based choreographer Isabelle Schad addresses community building in dance. Forms and practices of folk and group dances of different cultures are scrutinised and examined in the context of contemporary work policy and the dancing body. The piece sees dance as a political act, and the body as a “site of resistance”. Associations with the Occupy movement and protest dances (such as Turkish Halay performed in a big circle during demonstrations) are obvious. Collective Jumps is a protest dance in some respects, oscillating between protest, trance, and sensuality; and between form, dispersion, and abstraction.
The Collective Jumps premiere comes together with the presentation of Movementscape, an installation by Aleksandra Borys that investigates relations between visual arts (walking art in particular) and choreography. You may also see the performance and the installation on Saturday, 13 December. The installation is open for viewing from midday to 7 pm at Słodownia + 1. Movementscape has been developed under a Młoda Polska (Young Poland) scholarship awarded to Borys by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage.
The jubilee will conclude with the presentation of a scholarship for research projects devoted to the latest developments in choreography. Established by Grażyna Kulczyk this year, the scholarship becomes yet another instrument in the wide array of tools by means of which the Art Stations Foundation has long been supporting the development of dance artists and raising awareness about dance.
About the events:
Isabelle Schad: Collective Jumps
The group?s body is made out of many.
We are exercising practices that have the potential to unite instead of individualize.
We are understanding this practices as a relationship to oneself and to one another, as a pathway. Those practices are biological ones, cellular ones, energetic ones.
We are looking at freedom in relation to form. To form that is made of and found by an inner process and its rhythms. Rhythm creates the form. Therefore there is multitude, multiplicity, subjectivity and variation, even within repetition. We are looking at freedom as the essence of happiness. We are looking for equality in movement and for the end of hierarchy between body parts. Relations between body parts are like relations between people within the group. We borrow floor, formation and holding patterns from other communal forms, such as folk dance, simultaneously getting rid of their codes for to make the less visible materialities underneath appear. We are relating resistance to questions of rhythm and protest to questions of organization and exercise.
We are resisting the esthetics of representation and those who promote it and this is definitely meant to be a political practice.
Could the creation of an infinite, unified, monstrous body possibly become a site of resistance?
***
“I’ve been dealing with the relations of form and content for a long time, asking where different forms come from, looking for their roots and beginnings. Because of their structure and the way they are rooted in culture, traditional folk and group dances seem perfect to investigate in relation to my own experience of the body in
Body-Mind-Centering ? and embryology. Just like a microscope, choreography enables a group to look into internal processes, spaces, and organs. The group becomes an organ in itself, while complex links between organic and cultural processes reveal themselves, become distinctive, take a concrete form. Importantly, the big group format stands in opposition to a small group format (solo, duet, trio?), so popular these days and forced by the financial situation of today’s choreography.
In this context, a group work becomes both an utopia and a protest, taking both actors and the audience on an intensely energetic journey.”
? Isabelle Schad*
“Through the flood of data and developments in technology, contemporaneity gives rise to new forms of community. Contemporary choreographers tackle them, asking about the essence of co-existence. The relationship between the individual and the society has always influenced art. Presently, the discourse is taken up in from a special angle: an autonomous subject is turned into a collective being by communications networks and abundance of files in the globalised world. Means of communication give rise to brand new forms of permanent ? and yet temporary ? community. Being singular has become an extraordinary state, while joining different communities ? be it Twitter or Facebook, whilst on an underground train or a plane ? is the rule. Choreography, as an arrangement of bodies in time and space, seems especially well suited to deal with the current questions of the form and ability of community.”
?? Esther Boldt*
[*translated from Polish by IMIT[1] ]
Isabelle Schad is a Berlin-based choreographer, whose internationally presented shows are the result of in-depth bodily explorations (mainly based on Body-Mind Centering) and research on the processes of bodily re-presentations. Her projects combine dance, performance, and visual arts. A turning point in Isabelle?s work was meeting visual artist and photographer Laurent Goldring. Since 2009, they have been creating the series Unturtled(s) (one of the performances was presented at the Old Brewery in 2010). She co-founded several projects/open collectives (Good Work, Praticable), which searched for ways of linking different practices and researches whilst questioning the modes of production. As an educator and choreographer, Isabelle works with HZT Berlin and conducts workshops all over the world (she has already been a teacher during the Alternative Dance Academy in March 2010). She is a co-organiser of the working space Wiesenburg-Halle in Berlin, and has been a Zen Shiatsu practitioner from this year.
concept and choreography: Isabelle Schad in collaboration with Laurent Goldring
artistic assistance: Lea Moro
dance/performance: Aniela Kokosza, Barbara Bujakowska, Dorota Michalak, Ewa Hubar, Gosia Mielech, Halina Chmielarz, Irena Lipińska, Iza Szostak, Jakub Margosiak, Janusz Orlik, Korina Kordova, Krystyna Szydłowska, Magda Bartczak, Magdalena Jędra, Marta Romaszkan, Natalia Wilk, Paulina Grochowska, Paweł Sakowicz, Sonia Borkowicz (Anton Bruckner Privatuniversität), Tomasz Foltyn, Ula Zerek
sound/composition: Patryk Lichota
lighting: Łukasz Kędzierski
photographer: Jakub Wittchen
production: Art Stations Foundation by Grażyna Kulczyk
co-production: Goethe-Institut in Warsaw
Financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of Poland.
Aleksandra Borys: Movementscape
Movementscape is a year-long project that investigates relations between walking art and choreography. As part of the project the artist undertook long hiking trips to check how this influenced her choreographic practice. The outcome of her ten month-long investigations is the installation Movementscapethat invites viewers to make their own journey into the landscape offered.
