isabelle-schad.net

In 2012 Berlin Choreographer Isabelle Schad and French artist Laurent Goldring created the piece “Der Bau”, for which Kafka’s unfinished novella of the same title has been serving as an inspiration source. Starting from the description of an animal’s burrow as a metaphor for the body, with its organs and secretions, they have been investigating the space of the stage as an organ. The labyrinth described by Kafka as a space deriving from the body itself, yet still belonging to it becomes the basis for their explorations of conceiving this new relationship between body and space that they have started with their series of pieces Unturtled in 2008.

During the creation process it became clear that space itself is an organ, and it should be seen as an extension, a prolongement of the body. Rilke’s statement about Rodin can serve as the guideline to understand this idea: Rodin does not sculpt the body, but the spaces around them. Schad & Goldring built a two-dimensional, planar, fluid space of large sheets of fabric. These external tissues are dealt with like internal tissues, and they respond in a surprisingly alive manner, at the same time as part of the body, as a shell, and as a partner.