Interconnecting Dance & Ecology

On three different dates Tanz im August will present the results of the open call "Interconnecting Dance & Ecology”, in which Berlin artists were called upon to submit concepts that deal with the themes of nature and sustainability. Each Saturday during the festival, 8 of the overall 22 short choreographies will be performed in different parcours in Berlin parks. The first projects will be shown in the Park am Gleisdreieck. They make it possible for the senses to experience how art, performance and sustainability are connected.

This is what the participating artists write about their performances:

Tatiana Mejía “Exhausted”

Inspired by Ga-gá/Ra-rá, a cultural tradition from Haitian and Dominican sugar cane slaves. A protest, a grief for the losses in the fields, a time to go ‘ga-ga’. Tatiana in a skirt, originally worn by male figures, embodies the dance of resistance, reflecting on the damage caused by sugar. A BIPoC body exhausted by the bittersweet past and future.

Choreografie & Performance Tatiana Mejía
Live Music Rafa Dujarric
Dramaturgy Elisabeth Leopold
Costume Ambra Fiorenza
 

Maren Strack“DAS FLÜSTERN DES KAUTSCHUK – Songlines für LKW Fahrer”

When songlines intersect with recycled truck tubes connected via a pipe system to retired organ pipes, and the pipes are played with the recycled air from the truck tubes, sustainable rhythms are created. As I glide over scrap metal plates with Grandma's iron skate blades, I condense the sound frequencies.

Performance Maren Strack
 

Umi Maisaroh “Unraveling”

“Unraveling” engages in the discourse of climate change and decolonization. It embodies resistance and liberation, to take off the layers of imposed narratives and reveal the truth about the past and the present and imagine a new future.

Concept & Performance Umi Maisaroh
 

Djibril Sall / liminal.rehab “interstitial communion”

Senegalese choreographer Djibril Sall will perform a summoning, offering his body up for possession by the Simb, in a performance that explores the compounding relationship between climate change and hypercapitalism and the resulting tension between an increasingly endangered cultural institution. In this performance, Djibril engages with tropes of the savage, the cannibal, the animist, and the witch doctor in a confrontational subversion of colonial pedagogy.

Choreography & Performance Djibril Sall / liminal.rehab
Costume Nico Navarro-Rueda
 

Jasmin İhraç “slow drift”

“We’ve seen over the past three decades a reduction in Arctic sea ice area in summer by about 50% . The remaining ice floes are only half as thick as they used to be. The sea ice volume is therefore only about one quarter compared to what we had thirty years ago. We humans have melted the other three quarters.” In her performance Jasmin İhraç works with the movement of ice, its aggregate and sculptural states, sharing parts of her research on the Ocean, ice and geophysical forces.

Performance Jasmin İhraç
Sound Jan Brauer, Renu
Interview quote Prof. Dr. Dirk Notz, Institute of Oceanography, Hamburg University
Thanks to Kadir Amigo Memiş, Gizem Aksu, Thelma Bonavita, Ana Laura Lozza, Abel Navarro

Martha Hincapié Charry “HEKATOMBE II – movements and rituals for the renewal of the world – excerpt”

Colombian BIPoC artist Martha Hincapie Charry amalgamates ancestral movements, sounds, and rituals, that sensitise about the current crisis in our entanglement with Planet Earth, which is leading us to the 6^th mass extinction. Martha inhabits an analog dance-sound offering/requiem for climate collapse, the disappearance of habitats, species and groups of Native inhabitants.

Choreography & Performance Martha Hincapié Charry

Kdindie & Luisa De Santi “Imago Cells”

Performing textiles on the emergence of imaginal cells. Two diverse bodies, of a dancer and a textile artist, intertwines what in biology is observed in the multicellular organisms metamorphosis. Focus on the microcosm of mitosis or cellular division to trigger new interspecies symbiosis and immerse the audience in unimagined macro ecosystems.

Choreography & Performance Kdindie
Textile art  & Performance Luisa De Santi
Coproduktion Crochetdoll & indiemotion
Technical sponsor MEZ Cucirini Italy
 

Shelley Etkin“Gut Instincts”

How can the digestive tract be a portal to connect with the gut-brain of our social-environmental bodies? Through the common act of drinking a cup of tea we enter into multi-faceted allyship with particular local medicinal plants. How might these plants infuse our guts to move in solidarity and reciprocity?

Thanks to  Jared Gradinger as a dialogue partner. Thanks to these lands and the plant allies present in this work.