The Body-Archive and War

Every Minute Motherland by the Maciej Kuźmiński Company plays on December 19 and 20, 2023 in DOCK 11 and tells of bodies as witnesses of war, trauma and normality.

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Every Minute Motherland by the Maciej Kuźmiński Company plays on December 19 and 20, 2023 in DOCK 11 and tells of bodies as witnesses of war, trauma and normality.

Continue reading “The Body-Archive and War”

Only Guests on Earth

The interdisciplinary evening Terrestrial Transit asks how we can embrace the earthly and finite transition of being as a way of life. With five performances at DOCK11 until December 9, 2023, the company Cranky Bodies concludes a nomadic project that began in Berlin and led via Brandenburg and the border town of Szczecin to the Baltic Sea.

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Cosmic Solidarity and Radical Softness

T.E.N.T. – A Cosmic Drift Mega Mini Festival took place at DOCK 11 from 11 to 14 November 2021. Of the ‘four evenings of evolving stories that share space and collide on a cosmic drift’, I attended two. I was rewarded with two beautiful and dazzling shows and a performance lottery in which I won a cosy and thought-provoking nap in a lace-made tent. T.E.N.T. Festival did not send me to a supernova or take me on an intergalactic trip (the bold promises made in the festival description), but instead made me reflect on the politics of care and softness, and on the necessity of supporting each other in our precarious and uncertain times. 

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As if Death Could Shine Like Stardust

How can death be imagined? The performance “TodAncestor — dust till down” is a solo dance performance by choreographer Yuko Kaseki and collaborators based on the combination of media, including video projections and live sound recording, with Butoh dance. Containing elements of ritual, it explores diverse aspects of death, such as fear and poetry. This live performance installation is showing at DOCK11 until Sunday 29 August 2021.

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Dramaturgies of Entanglement

Perth-born and Berlin-based choreographer Emily Ranford premiered her most recent work “Forcefields iii” at DOCK11, 19 to 22 August 2021. This skilfully choreographed piece concludes the “Forcefields” trilogy, that explores, as Ranford describes in her programme notes, ‘a network of interdependencies endlessly morphing and curling on itself into previously unseen shapes.’ I searched for the missing link between the signifier and the signified in this piece, which, although beautifully performed, lacked dramaturgical deftness and emotional power towards the end.

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Hearing Your Skin: soundance festival is Back in Town!

From 11 to 27 June soundance festival Berlin is submerging our senses with an interlacing of digitally presented dance and music works, physically experienced video installations, fully breathed open air performances, as well as a programme of talks and lectures. Led by artistic director Jenny Haack at DOCK 11, the Zionskirche Church, and the garden of EDEN Studios, the 2021 festival edition presents 66 artists in 16 pieces and six dance film videos. The latter can be enjoyed both as a walk-in screening at DOCK 11 and as online streams. With this attractive combination of formats, dance and music works are (slowly) coming back as a physical part of the city’s texture to celebrate the beginning of the Berlin summer!

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Filming Utopian Body

“Vogel | 4 Solos” is a sequence of four solos, directed and choreographed by Christine Bonansea, and filmed at DOCK 11. Led by a powerful blend of stark lighting design and raucous soundscapes, this work aims to embody Michel Foucault’s notion of the utopian body — a daunting task for a string of four separate filmed solos that had been initially devised as simultaneous performances amongst which spectators could carve their own paths. Bonansea faces this challenge with a blast of power and creates a thought-provoking study on the limits of emotional perception.

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The Expansion of Joy — An Interview with Anna Nowicka

‘Dear Anna, I hope you are well! […] Due to this second lockdown, we cannot review any performances in the theatres anymore. As an alternative, I would like to interview you on the topic of ‘bodily joy’. It comes from my realisation that, due to the distance, the lack of spontaneity, and the absence of live get-togethers, I find it hard to experience joy in my body myself. And it’s a loss. Therefore it would be great to talk to you about how to keep finding joy in the body in these awkward times. […]. Best, Annette’

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Another Kind of Kinesthetic Empathy Is Transmitted on Screen

In the times of corona, when live dance events are (still) not possible, the digital format remains. You can love it or leave it, and not everything is suitable for filming. However, there are dance films, films explicitly choreographed for the camera and the screen: available for viewing until 6 May in POOL 20 – Spring Edition of the Internationales TanzFilmFestival Berlin at DOCK 11 online.

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Don’t Wait

Out of the four days of the T.E.N.T. PALACE MINI-MEGA FESTIVAL (DOCK 11, 20 – 23 February, 2020) Inky Lee attends two evenings and relates on the ways T.E.N.T. ‘host dreams, desires, and basic necessities.’

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