A workshop during the Symposium Dance Round Table Berlin September 2018 by Peter Stamer and Ilya Noé
For decades, the Berlin dance scene has been venting the need for other spaces for contemporary dance, based on the assumption that dance’s specific qualities ask for a particular kind of spatiality. The workshop was another attempt to gain access to that need by creating a playground, however speculative, for common imaginaries.
„The work of imagination welcomes images into the process which even you would not have thought of. Things don’t need to function this or that way or have to make sense. Simply embrace their dysfunctionalities if they appear to be broken or useless or have a ridiculous shape or bear an unfitting colour. You become something like an archaeologist, digging, as if these objects, that environment have always already been here.“
When it comes to a project such as the Imaginary (Dance) House it’s not the first time that theatre-maker Peter Stamer asks people to close their eyes: in his piece For Your Eyes Only which premiered 2011 at Tanzfabrik the performers invented and staged stories solely with their eyes closed. And at Tanznacht Berlin 2018, he (and Silke Bake) invited 24 choreographers and dancers to close their eyes and re-enact contemporary choreographies for a project called A Piece you Remember to Tell – A Piece you Tell to Remember. Otherwise Peter keeps his eyes wide open when it comes to his performances, installations, videos or texts he creates internationally.
Ilya Noé is visual/performance artist-researcher, eager collaborator, sporadic teacher, occasional curator, dissertation sufferer, chronic walker, and enthusiast of slow research, messy theory, and interspecies dialogues. Born and mostly assembled in Mexico City, she has since expanded her zone of propagation by popping up on all sides of the Atlantic and the Pacific to trace lines and build spaces by hand and on foot. She now lives, loves, and happily struggles in Berlin.
Take your shoes off and please make time to stay.
If you are in a hurry we suggest that you come back later.
