We interviewed Franck Chartier from Belgian collective Peeping Tom over the course of Tanz im August festival, where they were present with “32 rue Vandenbranden”. One of the inspirational sources for this piece was Shohei Imamura’s The Ballad of Narayama where an old woman is taken to the top of mountain Narayama by her children, to die. Gabriela Carrizo and Franck Chartier wanted to dig into all the physiological burdens that can prevent people – even those who appear to be at total liberty to do what they want – from ever really escaping their roots, their family or their culture.
The action takes place under a wide-open sky in a mountain landscape with only rickety campers for shelter. We find ourselves in a small isolated community where the inhabitants are confronted with their loneliness. The focus in this creation lies on the internal forces that determine which turn the characters will take; their motives are being exposed and stripped of their consciousness. The borders between what happens in reality and what they believe that happens become blurred. They lose themselves in fear and remain trapped in their own isolation.
Tanz im August: Interview with Peeping Tom
Meg Stuart: “Material is alive, and we can dialogue with it”
We interviewed choreographer Meg Stuart over the course of the 28th Edition of Tanz im August Festival, where she was present with the solo “BLESSED”. An apocalyptic scenario in a stage format, including funny appearances by a Brazilian carnival dancer: a sonny boy, clad in white and sandals, stalks through a cardboard paradise with a Swan Lake swan, South Seas palm tree and hut. But soon his paradise is left to decay. The catastrophe enters in the form of relentless rainfall that brings destruction instead of blessings. Time becomes the critical factor, and while Doris Dziersk’s stage design begins to collapse, the dancer and choreographer Francisco Camacho is subject to a transformation and confronted with the impossible task of building a shelter with soggy cardboard. Given the context of hurricane Katrina, Stuart’s piece shows a slow collapse with no escape routes – all the way to a slow-motion run through a destroyed wasteland. Stuart and Camacho had already worked together on Disfigure Study in 1991; in 2007, Stuart developed “BLESSED” for him, embedded in a sound collage by Hahn Rowe. The piece was awarded the 2008 French Theater, Dance and Music Critics Award for best foreign performance, and a Bessie Award in the category ‘outstanding visual design’ in 2012.
Tanz im August: Interview with Motus
Daniela Nicolò and Enrico Casagrande share fascinating insights on the recently shown and much celebrated MDLSX.
The bleeding pain and warm gratitude of Silvia Calderoni’s voice honor each and everyone’s fleeting being that cannot be contained within the borders of the body, skin color, sexual organs or boundaries of national identity.
Silvia Calderoni’s strength is endearing to us as she takes on godly imageries of a postmodern, gender embracing mother nature, all the while interweaving literary and autobiographical evocations in a labyrinthine and unforeseeably cathartic existential parable of each and eveyone of us.
The interview took place over the course of the 28th Edition of Tanz im August Festival.
Tanz im August: Interview with Sebastian Matthias
We shape our urban surroundings collectively, often without even noticing it; this is how we create the daily groove of a city. For three years now, in his performance series groove space, Sebastian Matthias and his team of dancers have been investigating the essential features of this specific rhythm: the tactile collective movement of a city. The last performance in the series, x / groove space, which was premiered in June at the tanzhaus nrw, is concerned with cultural crossovers and the points of contact between the urban dynamics of inhabitants of Düsseldorf and Tokyo.
Sebastian Matthias was kind enough to release an interview shortly after his performance, which took place on the 15th of August 2016, in the course of the 28th edition of Festival Tanz im August in Berlin.
