Projects

In this collaboration titled Contribution for Shared Landscapes, Begüm Erciyas and Daniel Kötter reflect on the significance of the vertical perspective on the landscape - a perspective constructed through satellites, maps, drones and mining resources -, as well as the fiction of a no man’s land constructed through these means. To this large group of audiences present on the landscape, they offer such an experience of an empty landscape. A landscape emptied of all human traces and viewed from above, now free to be once again occupied.

Holding Present is a new collaboration between choreographer Ula Sickle and the contemporary music ensemble Ictus. Holding Present examines how an individual gesture can become a powerful collective act. Weaving a fabric of existing and newly commissioned compositions by Alvin Lucier, Pauline Oliveros, Stellan Veloce and Didem Coskunseven, a group of seven performers slowly and consciously build a moment, a momentum, moving toward the breaking point where individuals become a critical mass.

The performance stages unusual instruments such as a swinging bull roar, aluminum tubes, handheld rocks and megaphones, as well as a modular synthesizer. The dancers and musicians collaborate to realize both the musical and choreographic score. The performers engage with each other on new terrain, charting lines of flight in the present. And while they build over the duration of the piece, the audience integrates into the fabric. They too become part of the moment, becoming responsible for momentum.

Durations is an ongoing series of performances curated by David Weber-Krebs in and around a glass house on top of the city. For this format, a series of practitioners are invited to think and develop an intervention with a durational dimension.

For Forest Silent Gathering, a group of audience members meet inside a forest at sunset and follow a soundtrack through headphones. An audio-social architecture is created, in which one can possibly be alone together. Changing distances invite to find new proximities. Absent figures become protagonists. As the communal space takes shape and transforms, Forest Silent Gathering makes us reflect on the bonds between people, forests and histories. What is it that keeps us together?

Nothing left to dream. Climax, anti-climax. Repetition, endless repetition. A thousand plateaus of crescendo. From the novella Last Utopia, by Persis Bekkering.

A collaboration between vocalist Stine Janvin (NO) and choreographer Ula Sickle (CA/PL/BE), Echoic Choir evokes the ritual of coming together on a dance floor around music in the late hours of the night. Relying on the power of acoustic voices and spatial resonance, with minimal amplification and effects, the project aims to create a collective and immersive sensorial event. Placing the performers and the audience in a shared space, such as a rave or nightclub, sound, choreography and the visual aspects of the work, such as light, create a strong synesthetic experience for the audience.

Echoic Choir was developed during Covid with strict parameters and physical distancing in mind, but the performance and set-up has shifted with each presentation of the work. In its minimalism, Echoic Choir breaks down the club experience to its essentials. In an immersive light setting, voice and body are at the center. The music is a patchwork of interlocking rhythms, hockets and words coming from the performers’ voices and bodies as they breathe, sing and move. Worn like a second skin, their collective sweat drips from their latex outfits. The spectators presence adds a level of density to the space, blending together with the performers, they embody a new kind of communal ritual.

What kind of attention do we give to the sounds of the environment we inhabit? What sort of agency do we have when these sounds start to disappear? The Silencing is a sensitive exploration of the role of the spectator in a theatre space. It mirrors what is happening outside of it – the profound impact that human activity has on its physical surroundings. On stage, a group of young storytellers establishes a shared practice of listening by interweaving autobiographical narrations, speculations, and audio recordings. They fill the theatre space with words and sounds. Until words fail them and there are no more stories to tell.

From prisoners to travellers, people have endured or enjoyed solitude of many sorts. They have resorted to writing letters as a means of communication with their closests. Sam Melville has done so from the Attica high-security prison, which he entered after bombing several governmental and cooperate buildings in 1969 in protest of the Vietnam War. At Attica, he played a key role in empowering and uniting the divided camps and races of inmates in the struggle for justice and human treatment, ultimately leading to the prominent 1971 Attica prison uprising. He would be shot and killed by police during the uprising. While outside, Sam repeatedly expressed his disappointment by others and he preferably acted alone. Once in prison, after an initial phase of isolation and despair, he soon became close to several black and Latino leaders. As his relationship with other inmates grew, his perception of what was possible at Attica changed. One day before his death, during the Attica Riots, while standing in a line of men with arms linked, he said to a negotiator: “whatever happens, tell everyone that people here are as together as I once hoped they could be on the outside.” The text used in Letters of Attica is solely a re-composition of fragments of Sam’s letters written between 1969 and 1971 in prison.

Three young people are sitting in their backyard. Making beats, writing songs for no one in particular, copying dances from the internet. And waiting. What else is there to do? The end of the world has already happened.

The Sadness is a choreographing of contemporary melancholy in the form of a concert. Created in 2020 during the height of the pandemic, the performers wrote their own songs reflecting on the ecological crisis and prevalent feelings of futurelessness. On stage, they play their songs live using an app designed especially for the project. Delving into the genre of sad core music, voices filter through auto tune, their singing merges with pulsating pop rhythms and heavy bass. Their voices becoming one with the machine.

The Sadness explores live music making as a collective act that forges new connections, between the present and possible futures, between bodies and words, between humans and the non-human.

The performance The Death of Ivan Ilyich is an adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s novel, known for the accuracy and irony with which the dying process is depicted. “A direct face-to-face encounter with death”, as the author himself once defined it. This adaptation takes the relationship between Ivan Ilyich and his compassionate servant Gerasim as the starting point for exploring a very specific relationship of care, the one for someone who is dying. As in Tolstoy’s novel, the performance gradually progresses towards a contraction of time and space that slowly leads to the death of the protagonist. The spectators are gathered in a theater to witness Ivan Ilyich passing away. In less than an hour, Ivan Ilyich will be dead. What is dying? When does it begin? And above all, when does it end?

In Voicing Pieces, one’s own voice is staged to become the protagonist. In the intimacy of an isolated sound booth, guided by a simple score, the audience becomes spectator of their own voice. The act of speaking and simultaneously hearing one’s own voice turns into a theatrical and choreographic experience, sculpted anew with each individual interpretation of the score. The voice becomes a place for action, a spectacle or a surprise. Isn’t one’s own voice always inauthentic and uncanny? Who is speaking, when one’s own voice speaks? Rather than recognizing oneself in the stranger, Voicing Pieces is an invitation to recognize the stranger in oneself.

A black flag floats in continuous motion. Its movement and the flapping of the fabric become both choreography and sound. Presented as a single continuous action, Relay draws its inspiration from the many recent protests taking place around the globe, the mass marches in Poland, in defense of women’s rights, called “Czarny Protest” (Black Protest). The black flag cannot be linked to one particular battle and hence defies easy interpretation. The Polish Canadian choreographer Ula Sickle and a diverse group of performers relay one another in a fascinating test of endurance. Their movements pass back and forth between inertia and hope, resistance and powerlessness. They each individually take on the responsibility to keep the flag moving, but it is the collective effort required that makes Relay such a powerful symbol. In an unplugged version of the performance, presented out-of-doors, the performers partner with the wind to keep the flag afloat.

Balthazar is a piece for one animal performer and six human performers. The protagonist is a donkey named Balthazar who is central to every action that takes place on stage. The project was inspired by Robert Bresson’s film Au hazard Balthazar (1966), which tells the eventful life story of a donkey. Balthazar is a long term artistic research project by theatre maker David Weber-Krebs and dramaturg and theorist Maximilian Haas which looks at animals and their position in Western culture. So far three performances were produced in cooperation with theater and dance schools and staged in theaters in Brussels, Hamburg and Amsterdam in 2013 and 2014. The three pieces were evolving in different branches/disciplines of the performing arts, namely theater, dance and music. All three had different conceptual focuses derived from the works of three philosophers that shaped the contemporary discourse around animals and animality most prominently: Gilles Deleuze, Donna Haraway and Jacques Derrida. The project is constituted by performance pieces, a book, numerous lectures and written contributions.