Faces, hands, and voices: as part of a long weekend of dance, Radialsystem presents the German premiere of the solo performance “Personne With Voice”, by Isabelle Schad and Laurent Goldring. Their new choreography originates with the concept of “Personne”: “Personne” is the French word for “person” and “cognisance”. It can also refer to absence, as in the expression “il n’y a personne” – “there is no one”. In Roman antiquity, “persona” referred to masks – theatre masks that represent a character or a ritual mask that specify the dancers’ social positions. A gradual shift moves the meaning through all these layers of identity, whether it be understood as personality, character, or as a subject without individual features.

“Personne With Voice” arose out of a creative process that is characteristic of their collaboration: the interweaving of the dialogue between the two artists with the projects that they work on individually.

Dancer and choreographer Isabelle Schad first studied ballet at the John Cranko School in Stuttgart. After working in various classical ensembles for six years, she moved on to contemporary companies, including Ultima Vez, led by Wim Vandekeybus, in Brussels. From 1999 onwards she initiated her own projects. Her work focuses on the body and its materiality, processuality and knowability, as well as the relationship between the unity of body–mind–soul, choreography and (re)presentation, and the issues of community-building and political engagement. Her works have been performed at international festivals as well as in museums and visual art contexts. In 2019 Isabelle Schad was awarded the Deutscher Tanzpreis for her outstanding artistic contribution to contemporary dance. Her work “Harvest” (2021), a collaboration with Theater o.N. and Offensive Tanz für junges Publikum, was nominated for the Ikarus Prize 2022.
isabelle-schad.net

The philosopher and visual artist Laurent Goldring has been working on themes of representation and, in particular, of the body since 1995. Goldring’s fundamental idea is that images are not representations but organs. He has had numerous exhibitions at a.o. Centre Pompidou (Paris), Foundation Gulbenkian (Paris), Fondation Cartier (Paris) and worked internationally with various choreographers including Saskia Hölbling, Sandrine Buring, Isabelle Schad, Louise Lecavallier, Benoît Lachambre, Germana Civera, Bernhard Lang, Donata d’Urso, JM Rabeux, Xavier Le Roy.

[Source: play bill]

TFB Nr. 1754