isabelle-schad.net

In the new work “Pieces and Elements” a group of performers negotiates the collective body in motion that can only function as a whole. This body with its different parts and multiple connections serves as a possible reflection of nature where each element is in relation to all the others in order for the whole to exist. “Pieces and Elements” deals with the fluid borderlines between a scientific, biological, cellular approach to the body and the one seeing the human body in relation to the cycle of nature. It places itself between visual arts and the performing arts, between installation and choreographic miniatures. After “Collective Jumps,” the first part of the trilogy on collective bodies, which investigates the body as a site for forming community, “Pieces and Elements” considers the phases of change and nature as possible energetic means for becoming one: as body, as self or as a group. In her recently premiered work “Solo for Lea,” Schad deals with a single figure as a portrait. “Pieces and Elements” draws on that experience and focuses on the collective body as cubistic landscape, which can be considered at once as a space of transformation and as the event itself. We are approaching an oscillation between organism, apparatus and hybrid matter, between experience and sensuality, between utopia and reality.

Dancer and choreographer Isabelle Schad studied classical dance in Stuttgart from 1981 to 1990 and worked with many choreographers until she started developing her own projects from 1999 on. Her research focuses on the body and its materiality, the relationship between body, choreography, and (re)presentation, community building as well as political involvement. Her projects work at the interface of dance, performance and visual arts and are presented on international festivals like Internationale Tanzwoche Wien, Tanz im August, International Arts Festival Beijing, ImPulsTanz Festival, and others. Moreover she had several collaborations with Goethe Institutes and is frequently invited to the German Dance Platform. She has co-founded several projects/ groups that use different working methods and research strategies to examine the possibilities of collaboration. She founded the project “Good Work” in 2003 with Bruno Pocheron and Ben Anderson, and she is part of the project Practicable, with which she realised the group works “Glazba” and “Muzik” in 2010 and 2011. Schad is co-director of the working space Wiesenburg-Halle in Berlin and since 2013 is also a Zen Shiatsu Practitioner. Furthermore, since 2006 she has been in close and continuous cooperation with Laurent Goldring, creating such early pieces as “Unturtled” (2008) and “DER BAU” (2012/13). Works they have shown at HAU Hebbel am Ufer include: “Collective Jumps” (2014), “On Visibility and Amplifications” (2015), a retrospective of Isabelle Schad and “Fugen” (2015).