In this work, the dancers change their forms from moment to moment, just like the flickering light, the changing weather, or the evolving plants and animals. Through the interaction of these different forms, the boundaries between seemingly opposing concepts, such as life and death, the ancient and the future, as well as harmony and chaos, are explored. Eventually, the stage, where even the boundary between information and matter has become blurred, will become a place of transformation.
Damien Jalet and Kohei Nawa aim to depict the unknown landscape that lies beyond.
Drawing inspiration from a wildlife documentary series he watched as a child, Tao Ye observes striking parallels between the intricate movements of animals in nature and the vast repertoire of human motion. Co-curated with Fan Xi, The World of Movements – When Body Language Comes Alive showcases for the first time the TAO Dance Theater 2 in the gallery of Renzo Piano-designed contemporary art museum By Art Matters in Hangzhou, China.
The exhibition features more than 20 dancers from diverse backgrounds performing in a setting of everyday furnishings, where they improvise continuously. Visitors can immerse themselves, either passively or actively, creating their own journey that interweaves familiarity with imagination, reconsidering how human bodies form connections.
At first, the goal is to present a thick, dense, and fibrous substance by choreographing a clustering of bodies. The dancers, spread horizontally, glide on the floor and over each other. Then, to make visible the moment when, after being pressed against each other, they detach, much like their internal bodily masses gradually engage in opposite directions. They start to move apart, to differentiate, moving in opposite directions while still constantly linked. Their dance mostly unfolds on the ground. The group’s tightening and expansions allow its movement: each contraction followed by an expansion into a new space. Together, they shape pneumatic volumes, making them palpable. They unfold with determination and gentleness through the notions of direct space (moving from one point to another by the shortest path), sustained time, and lightness of weight.
Finally, the group develops a more vaporous material: the treatment of space, which was direct in the previous phase, becomes indirect (movement from one point to another is curved and sinuous). A floating quality, conducive to resonance, sets in. The seven dancers are always in contact; the group moves and changes shape, but now, it remains expansive, and the dancers invest both horizontal and vertical space. Together, they float, they wander through the meanders of a labyrinth (each one’s inner bodily space and the group’s space). Inhabited by the light and elastic roundness of sacro-cranial vibrations, their volume encompasses the labyrinth; they move through its passages, savoring the thickness of each moment, the eternity of dilated time.
To mark ARTONOV’s tenth anniversary, dancer-choreographer Akaji Maro, a living butoh legend, meets virtuoso cellist Eric-Maria Couturier, soloist with the Ensemble intercontemporain, for an original performance.
Based on Johann Sebastian Bach’s Cello Suites, the butoh dancer and the musician dialogue and improvise, in a radical staging that transcends historical periods, cultural areas and artistic genres.
With a narrative based on the development of a human being, the performance explores with intensity the notions of identity, in all their ambiguity and contradictions.
A powerful and harmonious encounter between two strong, original personalities at the peak of their art.
Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, the most iconic classical ballet score, first staged in Paris in 1913, meets Bharatanātyam, one of India’s best-known traditional classical dances. Seeta Patel, a choreographer of Indian origin based in England and now an associate artist at Sadler’s Wells in London, with her The Rite of Spring offers a bridge between Europe and Asia, a place where prejudices are overcome to leave room for a hymn to life realised by a perfect interweaving of dance and music.
A dialogue with the choreographer is planned at the end of the performance.
The Rite of Spring was nominated in the Best New Dance Production category at the 2024 Laurence Olivier Awards.
Georgina Philp, known in the ballroom world as Legendary Trailblazer Mother Leo St. Laurent, invites you to the Jahrhunderthalle Bochum for an unforgettable evening full of glitz and glamour. At the Pump Into The Future Ball, the Ruhrtriennale will celebrate ballroom and its outstanding performers on the runway. A range of houses and participants will show off their talents in front of an international jury and compete with each other in classical ballroom categories to take home one of the coveted trophies.
Ballroom culture originated in the USA, where it was invented in New York in the 60s/70s by Black and Latinx trans women. Ballroom was introduced to Germany by Mother Leo with a first ball at the Berlin Voguing Out Festival in 2012. That same year she also founded the first local ballroom house, which was known at the time as the House of Melody.
To coincide with the Pump Into The Future Ball, Georgina Philp will also meet international icons of the ballroom scene for a panel talk about ballroom. In addition to the panel talk, there will also be workshops on voguing and runway given by the ballroom community.
