Second trip to Teufelsberg: Tamandua tying my body in a planty tunnel. Melting and twisting me into nature. Whilst being pulled from both ends another friend rescued me from time to time. Tourists chattering by my ear, but mostly didn’t see us behind the thicket.
Tying: Tamandua
Photos: The Moose
© SommerProductions
Starting to work with Frieder Weiss.
This Saturday night in Mitte:
My friend Virginia Barratt from Australia is in Berlin, and together with her Frances d’ Ath and Neha Spellfish, we have a show at Kunsthaus KuLe.
‘This Poem is not a Panic’
chaotic lines unspeaking sense in a sonic field of deep data and hammering silence, chaotic lines tying dissociated limbs as speech becomes gesture dressed in corpse paint. let’s be self conscious, awkward and embarrassing, let’s make angst from speech and produce a humorous balm from the awful. laugh cry laugh laugh cry. the ocean is an ocean of tears. the wind is many sighs. creep around the uncomfortable, making monsters out of reason.
neha spellfish: sonics
virginia barratt: performative crying
dasniya sommer: creeping butoh corpse and rope
frances d’ath: black metal bedroom
schnucki rennpferd: bondsman
Saturday July 9th, 2016
10.30 pm -1 am
Kule e.V.
Auguststraße 10
10117 Berlin
Germany
Some twenties expressionist dance. Combining shibari and butoh. Thanks Sarah for the lovely face paint!
Breaking new soil with butoh last week. I attended a one week workshop lead by Mako and Hikaro Inagawa at Tatwerk. It was an ambitious enterprise,
which worked in the end :)
Nine participants, singers, performers, a care giver and philologist, eagerly absorbed the japanese performance tools, and 4RUDE‘s approach. Trying hard to make faces like rotten cows, breaking branches, or repeating spider walk over and over. It gave us a good muscle hangover!
About two month ago I started taking butoh classes. Looking for a change in my body and different imagery to dance from. I am discovering this, but allready it’s a beautiful contrast to the airborne ballet. Not striving for the sky, but connecting with the soil, and giving topics around death for example a dancy form. Its also just fun, and maybe a return to expressionist dance.
The images we worked with are often short stories, so called Butoh-fu. A kind of vocabulary to generate creative mind states. From which than the physical expression comes. For example a room full of pollen, sneezing faces or a grave keeper calming a pack of barking dogs. Or a crayon, with a childish face, sort of asking what do I draw today?
All this to tell Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. (Only part I, part II is following in November.)
In Hikaru’s work, there is seldomly one to one illustration of the narrative. This I already liked in their last piece CELLuLOID. Having a nice level of abstraction, and despite slow motion, an ongoing, dense concentration all the way through.
So, often there is stillness on the body surface, but internally we crossed the desert without water..
Join me next week end in the puppet theatre mayhem of Frank Miller’s Sin City!
By das Helmi
April 15th Friday & 16th Saturday
At: 7 pm Sündenstadt 1 (with me ;)
At: 9 pm Sündenstadt 2
Ballhaus Ost
Pappelallee 15,
Prenzlauer Berg
A Butoh performance by 4RUDE and workshop participants (including me! ;)
April 17th, Sunday at 8pm
Tatwerk Berlin
Hasenheide 9
Gewerbehof – 2. Hinterhof, Aufgang 1, 3. OG
U7 & U8 Hermannplatz
The second round of staging shibari workshop went a step further. Mainly I was interested in working with white face colour, somewhat butoh inspired, and trying new technical equipment. We now have a little studio with light control and black backdrop.
The group was smaller, 6 people, mostly new to shibari, some bold some shy, but in general calm, concentrated vibes were coming from the table scene.
“How does Flying work on stage?” somebody from Hau asked me sometime in January. A couple of hints forth and back, and I suggested these guys for professional flying machinery.
“Let me know if you need help with moving in the air!”
I ended up making a sort of aerial choreography for Veit Sprenger’s Enter the Hydra, which was part of the Heiner Müller Festival at the Hau.
Rita Stelling, who in the solo installation performed Heraklis II, was super cool to work with. We immediately connected and had much fun throwing together ideas on how to treat the abstract landscape made of cubes, amorphic object and dangerous triangles created by Alexej Tcherni. The whole theatre machinery was involved. Iron curtain, revolving stage, fog, projection and life music and much more.
An overload of information in only 30 minutes, but put together in such a fine, condensed way, that each picture kept something poignant and simple. Mostly it was the tension between the whole staging and Rita as performer which made it strong on all sensory levels, I think. Visually, but also as text – image and sound installation.
All in all, a fortunate spontaneous collaboration. Here some rehearsal and performance moments.
The workshop, a fun experiment on 30 square meters. Ballhaus Ost borrowed lights, Uferstudios a dimmer, I threw costumes ropes and make up in. Us 10 people figured our roles for the evening as light performance-, camera-, fog- person, singer or audience. Squeezing through my tiny dojo in Uferhallen, which currently looks more like a suspension point forrest.
We started by talking and gathering ideas, I assigned tasks to the riggers and models, we had to find a group timing, and everyone went to find small stories with their partner.
It was exciting and tricky to handle light without distance to the scene. More fog! I was hectically torn between photographing, arranging and watching, and super happy to have such great technicians in the group shibari- and stagewise.
Some hidden talents! :) There was precise as well as messy tying going on.
Within our 30 minutes sequence there were moments when things came together, when stillness took place between the three hanging bodies, and Micha started singing. Here some moments..
An easy version of ‘MA – Idiosyncrasy’.
Faster than Osada :)