Performance – Installation
Concept : Charlie Fouchier
Dance : Mikael Marklund/Charlie Fouchier, Clara Sjölin, Nils Ulber
Costume : Maryna Ianina
Light : Thomas Achtner
Installation/Stage design : Charlie Fouchier & Team
Première : 17.11.2017 – LOFFT, Leipzig
Further performances :
18.11.2017, LOFFT, Leipzig
21. & 22.04.2017, LOFFT, Leipzig
16.06.2019, Kunstfabrik Flutgraben, Berlin
Work-in-progress presentation : 25.10.2017, Hellerau, Dresden
Production : Charlie Fouchier
Grant : Culture department of the City of Leipzig
With the support of the association Studio Fictif
Residencies : Ménagerie de Verre – dans le cadre des Studios Lab (Paris, FR), Hellerau – Europäisches Zentrum der Künste (Dresden, DE), Theater im Pumpenhaus (Münster, DE).
As an installation of a performance, the project aims to offer the audience a special sensory experience in which the audience is invited to perceive the bodies and movements of the dancers with their own bodies.
With particular attention to their spatial, temporal, physical and sound perceptions, the dancers develop a choreography composed of elements such as breathing, touch, gaze, perception of covered and revealed areas of skin, and plays with the visibility and invisibility of the moving body.
Through empathy processes, the proximity of the body and the discovery of skin surfaces challenges the limits of the individualities in the piece : To what extent does the visibility of the body give us access to the other? What is the nature of the intimate space that is the body of the other for me? How does its unreachability bring me back to the unknowable mental and physical dimensions of my own body? To what extent does the acceptance of the otherness of these spaces provoke a let go of the intellect and a permeability of the presences? How does this permeability create a new perception of otherness and bring forth bodies as presences existing through- and with- another in a common space?
The word “βᾰθος” comes from ancient Greek and means space expansion (ie depth, height, width, fullness), but also depth of meaning : beyond the gesture and the representation, this notions allows us to articulate movement and signification as spatial arrangements of the bodies. Therefore, we can look at the movements no longer as signs or for the images or connotations they would arouse in us, but in their actuality or potentiality in space.
By playing with the complicity and misunderstandings which arise through the encounter of individuals in motion, the piece blurs the boundaries between the presences. As it unify or differentiate them, the writing of times and spaces forms in this situation of ex-position of the bodies the experience of the dancers. Through situations that are sometimes playful, sometimes intimate, the individualities discover themselves to each other and appear as a network of intentions in space.
This choreographic work asks us what is the degree of involvement of our bodies in the elaboration processes of our social and political frames and in the performance of our rational choices. The complex and multifaceted perceptional ground which is to us our body makes possible to re-apprehend and rethink those frames and those choices. With this piece, I aim to create a space in which this complexity opens to us a renewed understanding of ourselves as individuals and as groups.
A production by Charlie Fouchier in cooperation with LOFFT – Das Theater. Funded by the City of Leipzig, Cultural Office. Infrastructural support from Studio Fictif Paris. Hellerau – European Center for the Arts Dresden (residency), Ménagerie de Verre – dans le cadre of the Studio Lab Paris, Theater im Pumpenhaus Münster.
*Funded by the Cultural Foundation of the Free State of Saxony. This measure is co-financed by means of taxation on the basis of the budget adopted by the members of the Saxon Landtag.
Charlie Fouchier 