Production Details / Press Releases
Today the present means crisis. Chaos no longer just seems to mean a state of exception, but a ‘model’ for the future that is as threatening as it is inevitable. Chaos instils fear. In opposition to the idea of an exclusive threat, Khaos is an ambivalent figure in Greek antiquity. It combines a wide variety of levels of meaning: gape, chasm, abyss, precipice. But it also names the horizon of expansion, immensity, breakup, or opening. As formless form, striving toward something different than it already is, Khaos invokes the dimension of becoming, of possibility, of renewal.
In KHAOS Laurent Chétouane brings together four dancers and three musicians to explore the possibilities of Khaos at the edge of chaos. Music by Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Rihm and John Cage resounds on stage, marking an affinity with the uncontrollable. The turbulence zones in and between the musical pieces are the starting points for the emergence of unstable, threatening, destructive spaces, to which the performers and the audience alike are exposed. The traditional vertical axis of dance loses its visual organizing power and the floor is the only thing that offers a foothold in these spaces without fixed vectors and coordinates. Exposed to the possibility of crashing, of losing, of fear and mourning, the dance becomes an autonomous doing and becoming, a state without goals or any predictable time axis. A body emerges that must discover new relations to the other, to space, to itself, in order not to fall completely victim to the blind and disparate forces of contingent openness. The risk of chaos dissolving the order of the one world is tested out in KHAOS as an open space in which to create multiple worlds.
Cast & Credits
Dance: Kotomi Nishiwaki, Tilman O’Donnell, Mikael Marklund
Music: Mathias Halvorsen (piano), Tilman Kanitz (cello), Artiom Shishkov (violin)
Choreography: Laurent Chétouane with the dancers
Musical concept: Laurent Chétouane with the musicians and Johann Günther
Light: Jan Maertens
Costume: Lydia Sonderegger
Sound: Johann Günther
Dramaturgy: Marten Weise
Assistant Choreographer: Sarah Blumenfeld
Assistant Costume: Anna Philippa Müller
Production: Christine Kammer, Hendrik Unger
We would like to thank Jean-Luc Nancy and Jean-François Peyret for their dramaturgical support and counsel.
A production of KHAOS GbR in coproduction with Onassis Cultural Centre Athens, HAU Hebbel am Ufer Berlin, Kaaitheater Brussels and Kampnagel Hamburg.
Funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation and Basisförderung Berlin/The governing mayor Berlin – Senate Chancellery – Cultural Affairs.
With support of DOCK 11 / Eden*****, Berlin.
HAU Hebbel am Ufer (HAU2)
Hallesches Ufer 32
10963 Berlin
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)
Laurent Chétouane / Trailers and Video Documentations
- Laurent Chétouane: Interview / Portrait Laurent Chétouane (2011)
- Laurent Chétouane: Op. 131 : End/Dance (2019)
- Laurent Chétouane: Invisible Piece #2: As if there were no end (2018)
- Laurent Chétouane: Invisible Piece #1: Duett für hörende Körper (2018)
- Laurent Chétouane: Out of Joint / Partita 1 (2017)
- Laurent Chétouane: SOLI (2016)
- Laurent Chétouane: Considering (2015)
- Laurent Chétouane: BACH / PASSION / JOHANNES (2014)
- Laurent Chétouane: Sacré Sacre du Printemps (2012)
- Laurent Chétouane: Hommage an das Zaudern (2012)
- Laurent Chétouane: horizon(s) (2011)
- Laurent Chétouane: Tanzstück #4: leben wollen (zusammen) (2010)