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My Patriot Act is US-born choreographer Rachel Brooker’s latest installment in an ongoing conversation with her homeland, both the actual physical and political entity and the intangible country carried within. Brooker moved to Berlin in 2006, and here found the space to artistically interrogate her relationship to her country of origin. The first instance of this exploration was Oh Beautiful: My Patriot Act, a solo presenting a kaleidoscope of characteristics of the US through the eyes of an expat. Oh, Beautiful was created during the Bush years in collaboration with videographers Kosei Takasaki and Chris King, and premiered two days after Obama’s inauguration. The last year has seen a dramatic change in the political and economic landscape of the US; the inner landscape that Brooker confronted in her solo has been swept away by Obamamania and the financial crisis, like so many other parts of the old “America”. My Patriot Act is the answer to this transformation. It is the second product of Brooker´s exploration, and has undergone similar dramatic remakes: very little of the original remains, much of what is still there from before is now being “quoted” like a newsreel from a past era.

My Patriot Act, the new work premiering this November in Berlin, is direct, personal, and close to the bone. Movement, sound and video amplify and antagonize each other, forming an eloquent expression of anger, resistance and love. Here, the personal is political, the political is the material of daily life, and the rubble remaining after social change can be the graveyard of the possible, or the source of all that comes after.

Rachel Brooker has made and produced performance work internationally since 1999. She founded and directs Dance, a dance theater company based in Berlin. Recent works includeInvitation, an interactive dance installation, and My Patriot Act, a solo in which Brooker grapples with the good, the bad and the ugly of being an American. She choreographed four site specific dance films with primary school students in Berlin with the Postcards from Berlin project which premiered in May 2009. She has also performed in Spain, England, Germany and the US with Marc Bogaerts, Felix Ruckert, Jenny Haack, Sabine Dahrendorf, Barbara Ruíz and Dai Jian (of Shen Wei Dance Arts), among others.