Why did we do all that: toughness, endurance, pain, the whole juvenile struggle and competition for skill and discipline aiming to become classical dancers? Four decades later, four former ballet dancers and a performance colleague look back on the time of their common artistic imprint on the occasion of a gala for Lajos Talamonti’s 40th stage anniversary.The memory of the structures is still alive in the bodies, the demon of the pursuit for perfection and universal beauty, for indescribable body poetry is still alive, but life has written completely new pages: full of contradictions, new beginnings, changes of perspective. Art and life have indissolubly mixed and rubbed off on each other. In a final joint dance, they – also through the temporal distance – make the rigid structures of classicism pliable, and tell of life as an often surprising school thats method everyone has to reinvent for themselves every day. The search for “expression”, once obsessively rehearsed according to precise rules, thus opens up a new terrain allowing the question of “style” to appear in a new light.

Lajos Talamonti studied classical dance at the Heinz Bosl Foundation/Ballet Academy of the Munich University of Music and Theatre from 1981 to 1990. As a dancer he was engaged at the Theater der Stadt Heidelberg and the Scapino Ballet Company Rotterdam. He was assistant director at the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz and has directed the theatre at the Kunsthaus Tacheles. Since 1997 he has been working as a freelance performance artist, director and writer in the independent scene in Berlin and in changing formations with a variety of artists and groups, including Hans-Werner Kroesinger, Forced Entertainment, Nico and the Navigators, Gesine Danckwart and Corinne Maier. The Sophiensæle, along with the HAU and the Theater an der Parkaue, have been central to his work since 1999. He works in German-speaking countries with many houses of the independent scene, European festivals, international collaborations, as well as with municipal and state theatres. Since 2013 he has been a member of the group Interrobang and creates immersive participatory performances and machines that play along. Alter Hase is Lajos Talamonti’s first and probably last dance production. He has invited dancers and movement artists to accompany him in this commemorative work. He has a personal history with all those invited. So they are more than just former (ballet) dancers.

[Source: dock11-berlin.de]

TFB Nr. 1726