PERFORMANCE:Rituals of Care
The Gropius Bau hosts a series of performances as it begins its 2020 program: an ongoing exploration of themes with particular contemporary urgency, including land and the Anthropocene, violence and repair. The performance series “Rituals of Care” resonates with the history, location and physicality of the building itself, which still bears the marks of wartime damage and its mending through carefully kept traces.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gropius Bau Archive
The performance program spans experimental choreography, healing practices, sonic installations and collective gatherings. These interdisciplinary works and practices explore the necessary conditions for coming together and tending to environments, to physical and spiritual worlds and to other beings. Through a range of somatic techniques, queer re-imaginings and indigenous perspectives, these performances offer radical acts of care and repair. Cevdet Erek extends his investigation into the trades of form and history around the Pergamonaltar and its famous frieze of gods and underground giants that has been displaced from Turkey and relocated in Berlin since the late 19th century. Erek proposes two related yet distinct works. Situated on the façade of the exhibition hall, “Left Right” imagines two large banners that at once mark and blur the divide across stereophonic sound production and political spectrums against the classicist and symmetrical architecture of the Gropius Bau. In the foyer, “Stereo” features Erek’s own sound system from his high school years that mediates and amplifies a newly made stereo mix. Together, these visual and sonic interventions emphasise the threshold between the outside and inside, prompting a new ritual that invites us to shift our perception of the space as we come in. “Landscape Soundings” a sound sculpture by Bill Fontana, will be played in the atrium in-between the performance events throughout the duration of the series “Rituals of Care”. Two distinct works can be heard in alternation. In “All Around” by choreographer/dancer Mette Ingvartsen and drummer Will Guthrie, spinning and turning, rhythm and speed become the main components of a performance that drives towards an ecstatic and trance-like intensity. With “evaporated landscapes”, Mette Ingvartsen creates an artificial world that behaves according to rules of evaporation, dissolution and transformation. Departing from ephemeral materials and matters like light, sound, bubbles and foam the performance constructs landscapes of various kinds. Also in “Manual Focus”, Mette Ingvartsen is turning faces 180°, arms and legs upside down and swapping the front with the backside of the body. Exchanging bodies from animals to disorganised creatures, to headless humans and other unnamed categories. With his performance “The Night Has Ears” artist Jelili Atiku addresses charged memories of violence still held in the building of the Gropius Bau and its surroundings. The work consists of a public procession and healing ritual, with the participation of 61 volunteers. The performance “A Invenção da Maldade” (“The Invention of Evilness”) by choreographer Marcelo Evelin is a raw and forceful meditation on corporeal rites and political tensions. In the performance “TOGETHER”, Maria Hassabi and dancer Oisín Monaghan propose a forceful choreographic meditation on methods of affecting and being affected by each other; on ways of living with and next to another. Via the intersection of performance and visual arts practices, Antonija Livingstone and Nadia Lauro stage “les études (hérésies 1-7)”, a queer symposium for rare presence and endangered practice – a visit to a chimeric library with caretaker kin. Antonija Livingstone and Mich Cota tenderly join forces with each other and wild companion materials to activate “CHAUD-collection of things / actions / relations”, a critical disturbance of territory, natures and cultures. Smoke, Water and Earth cooperate with the artists in the work of unsettling. “Dead Time Blue” is composed specifically for and against the acoustic characteristics of the atrium at the Gropius Bau. Artist Pan Daijing has written and directed the work using the operatic voice as an instrument for architectural intervention. “Untitled Duet (the storm called progress)” is a new performance by boychild conceived with dancer Josh Johnson along with DJ and sound composer Total Freedom, experimenting with techniques of improvisation and pressing against a linear unfolding of representation and of history.
Info: Gropius Bau, Niederkirchnerstraße 7, Berlin, Duration: 15/1-2/2/20, Days & Hours: See program, www.berlinerfestspiele.de
