Skip to content

External media
Our website uses plugins of the video portal Vimeo. When you click to play a video, you agree to the collection and sharing of your data with Vimeo and the connection to a Vimeo server is established. The external Vimeo player is loaded with Do-Not-Track parameter.

Analysis tools
In order to analyze access to our video content anonymously, we use the open source web analysis service Matomo.

For further information, please see our privacy policy.

Recording: 2021-07-21 , Sophiensæle (Video © Walter Bickmann)

Isabelle Schad, Aya Toraiwa

FUR

Sophiensæle

Production Details / Press Releases

The works FUR, Rotations and TURNING SOLO 2 are part of an ongoing series by choreographer Isabelle Schad, in which she moulds rhythms and energies into choreographed experiences. Together with the performers, she creates three very personal portraits. The works invite to dive into a process of timelessness, of closeness and contemplation.
isabelle-schad.net

FUR is an encounter with the Japanese dancer Aya Toraiwa and her hair, which reaches her knees. The hair covers and clothes, becomes a shelter and a prosthesis: a fur-like outer layer and extension of the body, the energies, the self. The fragile material around the body reveals what seems hidden and acts as a transition between the inner and outer worlds.

[Source: sophiensaele.com]

The world’s recent situation with the Coronavirus pandemic brought up many questions – personal and general ones – and has been asking for new ways to move on, for new formats and frames within a diversity of restrictions and rules, in order to stay safe and healthy. And it asks for more than that: it asks for healing, contemplation; it asks the question how to stay connected, connected to oneself and to each another, in general and specifically in a time where contact, physical proximity and closeness in the larger sense have been constrained or forbidden.

Due to those restrictions, I have been working in 1:1 formats for the last couple of months. Practical conditions informed the artistic process. Through a daily practice of attention, care and listening to each other, distance got reversed to proximity: a close relationship to oneself and one another is being cared for.

The physical and energetic approach to the new Solos FUR and ROTATIONS, which are part of my portrait series, are also a response to the current crises. They are meant to be a timeless process of diving into another world, a world of proximity and contemplation.

TURNING SOLO 2 is a prolongation of the solo performance with the same title: Turning Solo. It is bringing two interpretations, two worlds, two singular portraits together in time: it has been a dream of mine for a while. Naïma and Jasmin are very different from one another, yet the action of whirling and dealing with the same score is a common base which offers plenty of cross-overs in resonances, experience: parallelisms of contrasting color.

With two t-shirts she makes African, Spanish and mystical cultural elements appear, mediates with a turban the habitus of other people, turns into a torero and a bull, enlarges into a giant, into fluttering fantasy creatures and demonstrates at the same time the euphoric joyful impact of dancing. (Michaela Schabel)

Not ecstasy is the object of the highly concentrated Whirling of the Self, but the meditative protuberance of movement energies that sustain the pull of the generated vortex. A delightful double meditation, which definitely makes the world become a better one. (Astrid Kaminski)

[Source: play bill]

TFB Nr. 1541

Cast & Credits

CONCEPT, CHOREOGRAPHY: Isabelle Schad
CO-CHOREOGRAPHY, PERFORMANCE: Aya Toraiwa
Music: Damir Simunovic
LIGHT: Emma Juliard
COSTUMES: Charlotte Pistorius
OBJECT: Volker Hüdepohl
PRODUCTION MANAGEMENT: Heiko Schramm

A production by Isabelle Schad in coproduction with SOPHIENSÆLE and Transart Festival Bozen.
Funded by the Senate Department for Culture and Europe and the NATIONAL PERFORMANCE NETWORK, coproduction funding for Dance, funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.
Thanks to Wiesen55 e.V.

Sophiensæle

Sophienstraße 18
10178 Berlin

sophiensaele.com
Map

Tickets: (030) 283 52 66

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

Aya Toraiwa / Trailers and Video Documentations

To top