Production Details / Press Releases
Animals on the Beach (2019)
They look like animals on the beach, thought Deborah Hay as she observed workshop participants and didn’t really know what she was seeing: it was precise, but also poetic and enigmatic. The association led Hay to the title of her new piece, “Animals on the Beach”, in which she has collaborated with five outstanding dancers familiar with the intimacy and stringency of her performance practice, and who have also contributed their own knowledge. For Deborah Hay is less interested in the movement than the person dancing and the relationships that create this dance.
Deborah Hay was a founding member of the experimental Judson Dance Theater, and toured worldwide in 1964 with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. For the last 30 years, she has written and published while developing her own language for dance practice and choreography, which she applies in her work with both untrained and professional dancers. Commissioned works were produced by the Forsythe Company, Toronto Dance Theater and Cullberg Ballet, among others. Last year the MoMA opened its major exhibition “Judson Dance Theater: The Work is Never Done”, which features Hay’s work alongside that of her pioneering dance contemporaries Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton and others. Deborah Hay has been a guest at Tanz im August three times before, with “If I Sing to You” (2008), “No Tme to Fly” (2012) and “Figure a Sea” (2016) with Cullberg.
Jeanine Durning is an artist in the areas of dance and performance. Her work has both ‘the potential for philosophical revelation and theatrical catastrophes’, wrote the New Yorker. On the basis of a practice she calls ‘nonstopping’, she carries on a continual research process that leads to various performances, including her solo “inging”, which she has shown more than 40 times in the US, Europe and Canada, and her group piece “To Being”. She has received numerous grants and residencies. As a performer, Durning has worked regularly with a number of choreographers since 2005, among them the pioneer Deborah Hay. In 2010–13 she took part in Hay’s work for the “Motion Bank”, a Forsythe Company project. Durning teaches at SNDO/Amsterdam, HZT/Berlin, Movement Research, New School/Lang College, WAC/UCLA and elsewhere.
Mattef Kuhlmeywas born and grew up in (East) Berlin, studied political science at the Freie Universität Berlin and has been working as a musician since 1999. At trained guitarist, for many years he has been active in the area of electronic music. His main interest lies at the interface of traditional music-making and experimental sound techniques. He composes and plays live for dance/performance/theatre productions by Hyoung Min Kim, Jo Parkes, Gabriele Reuter, Nico and the Navigators, Deborah Hay, Rabih Mroue, Jan Martens, DANCE ON ENSEMBLE, Hans Werner Krösinger/Regine Dura and others. With the band ALP he creates soundtracks for silent films, including “Berlin: Symphony of a Great City”, “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”, “Battleship Potemkin”, which he performs in numerous concerts in Germany, Switzerland, Poland and the US. He is also the sound designer for the Thalia Theater Hamburg, Salzburger Festspiele, TwoFish, Gisèle Vienne and others.
Vera Nevanlinna studied at Helsinki Dance Institute and Theatre Academy of the University of the Arts in Helsinki, Finland, from where she graduated in 1998 with a M.A. in dance studies. Since then she has worked with Eeva Muilu, ChameckiLerner, Miguel Gutierrez, Kirsi Monni, Janne-Camilla Lyster, Mart Kangro, Thomas Lehmen and Ervi Sirén among others. Nevanlinna began her collaboration with Deborah Hay in 2005 and has performed and toured works of Hay’s including “News”, “If I Sing to You”, “Lightening” and “Figure a Sea”, commissioned by Cullberg. She has done interdisciplinary art productions with photographer Elina Brotherus, poet Tuomas Timonen and sculptor Maria Duncker. Her latest collaboration was with photographer Elina Brotherus in Règle du jeu: Carte Blanche PMU (Centre Pompidou, Paris). She has been the Artistic director of Zodiak – Center for New Dance in Helsinki 2009-2011. In addition to her dance studies she has graduated as a photographer and a Yoga teacher.
Tilman O’Donnell was born in Boston, Massachusetts to a German mother and American father. He trained at the National Ballet School in Toronto, Canada, and joined the Göteborg Ballet in 2001. In 2002 Tilman worked at the Staatstheater Saarbrücken. From 2003 to 2007 he was a member of Cullberg, Sweden, from 2007 to 2012 of the Forsythe Company in Frankfurt, for which he continued working as a guest until its closing in 2015. In 2002 he made his debut as a choreographer, developing independent projects as well as commissions for Cullberg, GöteborgsOperans Danskompani, Corpus/ Royal Danish Ballet, Staatstheater Graz and Bora Bora/Århus. In 2019, aside from his premiere with Debroah Hay at Tanz im August, Tilman developed a new solo at the Künstlerhaus Mousonturm for the “Manufactured Series” (Fabrice Mazliah), and will create a new large-scale work for Corpus, Copenhagen. Tilman teaches internationally, and is a member of the multidisciplinary artist platform HOOD.
Street dance and musical theatre began Christopher Roman’s relationship to dance when he was 9 years old. He began his formal training at 14, and went on to train at the School of Cleveland Ballet, where he also danced as an apprentice, and later studied at The School of American Ballet in NYC. He joined the ranks of the Pacific Northwest Ballet in Seattle, and as a soloist and principal with Edward Villella’s Miami City Ballet, Les Grands Ballets Canadiens in Montreal, the Pennsylvania Ballet and the Frankfurt Ballet, which began his long-term artistic relationship with William Forsythe, continuing on with the Forsythe Company. Christopher has been a collaborator for the works of Forsythe and many other renowned choreographers in his over 30-year professional career. He was the associate artistic director of the Forsythe Company, is a stager and choreographic assistant for the works of Forsythe, a trustee of the Foundation Forsythe and is currently on tour with Forsythe’s most recent work “A Quiet Evening of Dance”. From 2015–18 he was a member and the artistic director of the DANCE ON ENSEMBLE, First Edition. Christopher is the 2009 recipient of DER FAUST Theaterpreis for best dance performer. He is the curator and organizer of the Hollins University European Study Program MFA in Dance, now based in Berlin in association with Tanzraum Wedding. In 2019 Christopher founded the SALTco. as artistic and executive director, with the mission to illuminate the worth, contribution and role of the dancer in the field. Deborah Hay’s “Animals on the Beach” is its inaugural work as lead producer.
Jiv M. Wagner trained as a lighting designer in the late 1980s in New York at Lester Polakow and Emily Gaunt’s Studio of Scene Painting, and he worked during this time at the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Since then he has lit many different kinds of artistic projects, from architecture to performances to musicals. His working tools sometimes vary considerably: he uses traditional lighting systems as much as computer-generated video mapping. In the area of contemporary dance he has developed lighting concepts for Amanda Miller, Aydin Teker, Sen Hea Ha, Susanne Linke, Sebastian Matthias, William Forsythe, Ziya Azazi and others.
Ros Warby is an award-winning Australian dancer and choreographer. Since 1990 she has presented her solo works at numerous festivals in Australia, Europe and the US, for example the Venice Biennale, Dance Umbrella at the Royal Opera House, London, the Sydney Opera House and in New York. Warby has performed in companies such as Russel Dumas’s Dance Exchange, Danceworks, Lucy Guerin Inc. and the Deborah Hay Dance Company. She began her long and fruitful collaboration with Deborah Hay in 1998. Since then she has performed and toured in many of Hay’s solo adaptions and group pieces. Warby has recently become adjunct assistant professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA).
[Source: play bill]
TFB Nr. 1345
Cast & Credits
Choreography: Deborah Hay
With: Jeanine Durning, Vera Nevanlinna, Tilman O’Donell, Christopher Roman, Ros Warby
Sound Design: Mattef Kuhlmey
Lighting Design: Jiv Wagner
Kostümdesign: Deborah Hay und die Tänzer*innen
Kostümberatung: Charles Heightchew
Zusätzliches Design für Jeanine Durning und Christopher Roman: Inga Aleknaviciute, Charles Heightchew
Production: SALTco / Christopher Roman
Coproduction: Tanz im August / HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, Tanzquartier Wien, Sadler’s Wells, Kampnagel
Funded by: NATIONALES PERFORMANCE NETZ Coproduction Fund for Dance, which is funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, Goethe Institut, Verlag der Autoren
Residencies: Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA, Department of World Arts and Cultures/ Dance, UCLA, Tanzraum Wedding
Supported by: Hollins University, AKR Foundation – Alice Kleberg Reynolds Foundation, Friends of the Deborah Hay Dance Company
Tanz im August 2019
Artistic Director: Virve Sutinen
Executive Producer Festival: Isa Köhler
Producer: Anja Lindner, Marie Schmieder (on parental leave)
Project Management: Simone Graf
Assistant to Artistic Director & Production Assistant: Alina Sophie Scheyrer-Lauer
Production: Florian Greß, Ben Mohai, Sofie Marie Luckhardt, Katharina Rost, Lovisa Sohls Söderberg, Charlotte Werner
Technical Director: Ruprecht Lademann, Patrick Tucholski
Tanz im August is a festival by HAU Hebbel am Ufer, funded by the Capital Cultural Fund.
HAU Hebbel am Ufer (HAU1)
Stresemannstr. 29
10963 Berlin
Tickets: +49 (0)30 259 004 27
tickets@hebbel-am-ufer.de
Video Documentation
The video documentation is produced on behalf of the Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion. The purpose of this contract is to document productions in the field of contemporary dance in Berlin. The master recordings are archived by the University Library of the Berlin University of Arts. Copies of the recordings on DVD are available for viewing exclusively in the reference collections of the following archives (at media desks in these institutions):
University Library of the Berlin University of Arts
Mediathek für Tanz und Theater des Internationalen Theaterinstituts / Mime Centrum Berlin
Inter-University Centre for Dance Berlin (HZT)