“Most people in Japan believe that if you pass away, your soul can sometimes come to visit. I don’t know exactly where this belief comes from. It has always been a normal thing. I met my grandmother after her death. It was in France.”
(laughing) “In France? You met at the Eiffel Tower?”
“Oh, no. I was sitting in the back of a car that we were driving through nature to go climbing. I was just watching the landscape outside passing by when she came to the window.”
“Did she say something?”

CLOUDS ON CLEAR SKY is a result of Johanna Ackva’s long term investigation into experiences around death, mourning, and finiteness seen as realities at the very core of life. Working with dancers of different generations and backgrounds, the choroegrapher’s role in this project is that of an interlocutor and facilitator for each of them. Revisiting autobiographical experiences, reflecting upon emotional and political implications of death, as well as diving into its iconographic and poetic notions are tools for the search of an individual physical language aimed at translating an untranslatable phenomenon and sharing it with an audience.

CLOUDS ON CLEAR SKY was created in 2021 as a series of three solos and one duet of a father and his daughter. For its reiteration, the series will consist of four solos. Encompassing and interweaving the consecutive evenings is the spacial design: an installation of blackboard-like surfaces on parts of the floor and the walls serves as a canvas for the dancers, who can choose to trace and/or outline re-mark-able moments of their dance. As reminders of past moments, lines and traces accumulate and become both, signs of absence and additional presences for the following dancers to reference.

Weaving into this second time of rehearsing and remembering the solos are three participatory formats that invite the audience to engage with specific aspects of the artistic process and its wider context. This side programm offers an afternoon workshop on heritage/inheriting, a tour on Alter St. Matthäus cemetery and a warm-up for audiences with the choreographer, happening before the last show of dancer Nagao Akemi on Sunday.

johannaackva.com

[Source: PR-Info]

TFB Nr. 1693