walterbickmann.de

The dance performance “icon” adresses aspects of identity, sovereignty, intimacy, and publicity in the context of personal interaction and communication. How do digital media and their tendency to abstract and rationalize influence our communication processes? What effects does the loss of physical presence have as we open up new areas of action and experience in the internet?
In his projects, the choreographer and video artist Walter Bickmann brings a complex structure of visual, sound, and movement layers to life. Film projections become an integrated part of the live performance and allow for an additional, virtual dimension of expression that goes beyond the limits of reality and creates unexpected viewpoints of atmospherical density.

Press: […] The choreographer and video artist Walter Bickmann realizes his projects using complex image, sound and movement levels. […] The projected images extend the physical presence, they make it easier to create different moods at the same time: while the dancers move on stage, images of their moving bodies are projected via video on the screens. The technologically produced images are as powerful as the live performance itself. This doubling allows the dancers to appear closer, more fragile and ambiguous – coming to the fore as sentient human beings […]
Marianne Burki, Neue Zürcher Zeitung 03.09.2011

[…] His (Bickmann’s) strength is the complete absence of irony. His choreographic art: images without false bottom, brilliant dedication to the craft. […] It is the video projection, the additional technical image, that transfers the first impression of the body to sense and emotion. […]
Arnd Wesemann, tanz Juni 2011

White Noise/ Walter Bickmann’s new production at DOCK 11 turns the dancer into an “icon”. The room itself already holds tension. On the back wall four white screens are mounted. The floor is covered with white marley. The screens and the marley in their clarity chafe against the raw brick walls in the performance space of DOCK 11. Blurrily fragmented and jerkily slow, a camera moves over bodies, heads, and hands. It’s about people, their reflections in the video, the interaction of image and reality, what Walter Bickmann develops as “icon” in the course of an hour, solidly and quietly. […] The first highlight is Zannou’s floor solo, which starts with a pointed finger of a lifted arm, using the arm as a motor. The body gets twisted into unreal sculptural figures, with an increasingly larger and faster tumble across the floor. Again and again in what follows, bodies are looking to burst open their limits. Taking over Zannou’s play with hands at first, the three dancers then fall into prismatic patterns, shaping them into liminal beings, grown together at the heads. That leads to two parallel duets, one head to head, the other with linked legs. Simultaneously their video images are sitting in tight chambers. What Bickmann created in this live dance alone, in terms of the organically woven togetherness with no loss of contact is unique in the Berlin scene. […]
Volkmar Draeger, Neues Deutschland 29.06.2010