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Recording: 2017-12-14 , HAU3 Hebbel am Ufer (Video © Walter Bickmann)

Isabelle Schad

Double Portrait

HAU Hebbel am Ufer (HAU3)

Production Details / Press Releases

“Double Portrait” – the portrait for Przemek Kaminski and Nir Vidan – seeks to form a solo for two persons with their bodies, movements and subjective rhythms. Each of them finds his prolongation in the other. In changing interdependencies a shared space defines self and other, intimacy and care, colliding forces and violence creating a web of connectivities. The work plays with aspects of Frances Bacon’s paintings, their complexity in visual rhythm, their intensity and immediacy. It raises matters around violence and sensuality, the role of temporality, the relation to oneself that expands into the other and into the world.

At the beginning of “Double Portrait,” the audience meets the performers: Przemyslaw Kaminski and Nir Vidan, situated in front of an ambiguous, dark canvas placed on the back wall of the performance space. Two performers are at the same time quotidian and formal, but between each other they are relaxed. How do they look at us? In their gaze is a curious lack of any recognition, it is as though they are looking at something of which they are not part. What is the relation of the dancers with the rest of the space, we are asking.

Very soon, we witness the interchange of the performers playing with the prolongation of their bodies into the other in a subtle but progressive rhythm, forming through its mechanics a new body of a new legitimacy.

This newly formed body invites us to interpret it, it wants to be read, marked, denoted, but at the same time it is exhibited as a playful surface on which it writes in, inscribes, prints out itself. The body in “Double Portrait” desires to be segmented, dissolved in fluids or experienced as a part of a larger machine, interconnected with other organs, fluids and intensities.

The performance operates by confusing our ideas of the image of a body and performers creating that image with their singular bodies. The image of the body in “Double Portrait” is in a constant discrepancy with the condition of the performers bodies. It involves relationship between the two bodies, the surrounding space, and its horizontal and vertical axes.

In “Double Portrait” we can exchange a psychological rewriting of the body with its biological processes. At the same time the social surface of the body becomes a place for meetings, care, violence which is inscribed in the flesh of the performers in order to carve out its subjectivity and its portrait. Paradoxically, “Double Portrait” shows us that each subject establishes and possesses an emotional community.
Saša Božic ́

The dancer and choreographer Isabelle Schad studied classical dance in Stuttgart and worked with a number of choreographers until starting her own projects in 1999. Her work focuses on the body and its materiality, the relationship between body, choreography and (re)presentation, community building and political involvement. Her pieces have been shown at international festivals including Internationale Tanzwoche Wien, Tanz im August, International Arts Festival Beijing, Impulstanzfestival. She had several collaborations with the Goethe Institute and is a regular guest at the International Dance Platform Germany. In 2003 she founded the international artists’ network and project “Good Work” with Bruno Pocheron and Ben Anderson, and is part of the project “Practicable”, with which she realised the group pieces “Glazba” and “Musik” in 2010 and 2011. In addition she has worked closely and continuously with Laurent Goldring. In 2015 they presented the retrospective “On Visibility and Amplifications” at HAU Hebbel am Ufer, including their works “An Un-Folding Process”, “Der Bau”, “Unturtled #1 & #4” and “Collective Jumps”, which was premiered in 2014 at HAU. In autumn 2015 she was reinvited with “Fugen” and in 2016 with “Pieces and Elements”.
isabelle-schad.net

Przemek Kaminski is a Polish choreographer and performer. He lives and works in Berlin and is currently a student in the BA programme “Tanz, Kontext, Choreografie” at HZT Inter-University Center for Dance in Berlin. He is also a graduate of the qualification course (contemporary dance) at the National Centre for Culture and the Masovia Institute of Culture in Warsaw and was awarded a diploma from the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage. In addition he has taken part in many artistic programmes, including the “XXI CSAV – Artists Research Laboratory” under the direction of Yvonne Rainer and the “Choreographic Laboratory: Borderbodies” with Meg Stuart. He has worked as a performer in projects by several artists, including Isabelle Schad, Juan Dominguez Rojo, Krzysztof Garbaczewski and Nicole Seiler. Amongst others, his own works have been shown at the Center for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Galeria Labirynt, the Art Stations Foundation(Pozna)ńandattheHamburgerBahnhof Museum for Contemporary Art.

Nir Vidan is a freelance choreographer and performer working in Berlin and Tel Aviv. In his own works and as a collaborator in the projects of other artists, he has been experimenting for 10 years, working with contemporary dance and performance art. In 2010 he finished his BA in dance theatre and education in Tel Aviv, going on to study in Berlin, where he graduated in the BA programme in Dance, Context and Choreographer at HZT in 2015. His most recent works “Horizontal Lecture”, “The War Department Presents: Untitled – war in progress”, “Epidermis” and “Heritage of Harmonica” have been shown in Berlin at the Kunstfabrik am Flutgraben and Uferstudios, at Het Veem Theater in Amsterdam and as part of the Room DanceFestival in 2014 in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. As a performer he most recently worked with the Berlin choreographers Miriam Jacob, Isabelle Schad and Emma Tricard as well as in pieces by the Israeli artists Yael Tal, Hila Golan and Galia Fradkin.

[Source: play bill]

TFB Nr. 1138

Cast & Credits

Concept & choreography: Isabelle Schad
Co-choreography & performance: Przemek Kaminski, Nir Vidan
Dramaturgical support: Saša Božić
Sound: Damir Šimunović
Lighting: Bruno Pocheron
Stage: Isabelle Schad, Bruno Pocheron, Charlotte Pistorius, Thomas Henriksson (painting)
Costumes: Charlotte Pistorius
Head of production: Heiko Schramm
Production de facto: Andrea Remetin
Production: Isabelle Schad
Co-production: HAU Hebbel am Ufer, defacto (Zagreb)

Funded by: Senate Department for Culture and Europe and Nationales Performance Netz (NPN) Coproduction Fund for Dance, which is funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media on the basis of a decision by the German Bundestag.
Supported by: Wiesen55 e.V.
Thanks to: Volker Hüdepohl, Maia Svartaker, Emese Csornai, Frances d’Ath, Uferstudios Berlin

HAU Hebbel am Ufer (HAU3)

Tempelhofer Ufer 10
10963 Berlin

hebbel-am-ufer.de
Map

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)

Isabelle Schad / Trailers and Video Documentations

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