»Movement A« by Ulf Langheinrich and Toshiko Oiwa


dance in the audiovisual environment


Wed 21st November | 8pm (premiere)
Festspielhaus Hellerau
admission: 12/8 Euro

description


Dance: Toshiko Oiwa
Audiovisual Environment: Ulf Langheinrich
Software: Dirk Langheinrich

Movement A

»Movement A« is our first joint project. In the process of working on Granular Synthesis together with the French dance company Angelin Preljocaj I also met Toshiko Oiwa. I showed her some extracts from a solo project that back then was just being developed. That was when the idea of making this project emerged.

Our approaches to working with time as well as our concepts of the relation between space and the body appeared to be quite similar. So did our ideas of professionalism, presence and subtlety. The idea came up to create something together at some point, and we kept reassuring each other about it. And that is what is happening now – 2 years later.

On the one hand there already are fix technical design parameters about the number and arrangement of a set of projections. It has also been agreed upon the lighting, the way the visual and the acoustic materials are set up as well as the way in which all this goes together with the presence of a human body. All this defines a certain framework. On the other hand there is nothing beyond this so far. For me, the state of NOTHING is a very soothing one. We do neither plan to present a kind of artistic interaction in the sense of an adaptation of one’s own work to the other’s; nor do we intend to comment on the dance audiovisually or show an animated dance generated by computer-based equipment. And it is not my ambition to create »something completely different«. At the moment we independently from each other develop our ideas and materials. For a start we will view these materials at the dance centre in Quagadougou.

Here in Ghana I almost every day experience being a stranger in an environment which I look at like an astronaut: the perception of time, denseness in terms of space, the futileness of endeavours. All this seems more like a never-ending state of being rather than a movement towards »the better«. In this context my own movement only makes sense as it refers to the Western world and its culture from this apparently endless distance. There, in these odd outskirts of »media art«, my movement is being perceived. Here, there are no such areas. Here my movement is merely senseless and absurd. But this senselessness and absurdity is what attracts me – an idiosyncratic no man’s land. Nothing is the way I see it. This is a state of being that I trust.

I am interested in consistency and denseness as qualities of experiencing a state, a single state that is being insisted on. This is also the topic of Toshiko Oiwa’s current studies. I know this, because we had a work meeting in February in Munich enjoying Bavarian veal sausages and pretzels. Afterwards she flew to Seoul, and I flew to Accra. What a wonderful place that was!

Ulf Langheinrich, Accra/July 2007

»What does body know that is not on our consciousness?
Experiencing African life reminds me of the great power within the body and its sense of time. It is a human necessity of listening to the cell memories in order to survive, understanding their stories to stay alive, to love.«
Toshiko Oiwa

»Movement A« is a work about trust and presence, states of movement, movement in movement
Intentions are pointless, the next remains invisible, it comes too fast, too slow.
The body in all its empty endless movement eventually disappears.

As the floor starts to oscillate in breathe like slow cycles,
the body floats in myriads of projected noise-particles
and sinks into layers of a digital alluvium,
peters out, into final stillness and invisibility.
Everything dissolves into waves of pure light.

Ulf Langheinrich, Accra, September 2007
http://ulflangheinrich.com/

The first production in autumn/winter this year is realized due to an initiative of the french agency Epidemic and the TMA Hellerau.

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