The Dancing Public
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5 okt21:00 - 22:15TR25 Schouwburg, RotterdamKleine Zaal
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6 okt21:00 - 22:15TR25 Schouwburg, RotterdamKleine Zaal
English
The Dancing Public is a dance celebration, a spoken word concert, an expression of pure physical distress. Do you feel it too? Tonight is for dancing. Tonight, we’ll be dancing…
Dance crazes are collective ecstatic outbursts of incessant dancing and unstoppable movement. With violent shakes and convulsions, to the point of exhaustion. The phenomenon has been observed since medieval times after major socially disruptive events, such as war, crisis or, well, a pandemic.
In her solo The Dancing Public, Mette Ingvartsen explores this ecstatic movement in the wake of a pandemic. She ushers out 2020’s solitary confinement with unabated dance action to an infernal stream of music, singing and spoken word. Do you feel it too, this extreme physical urge to move? What is it? Possession, a curse, a neurological breakdown? Insanity? Or is the body dancing to protest, because it wants to live life to the fullest?
The Danish choreographer Mette Ingvartsen studied in Amsterdam, Brussels and Sweden. In 2003 she founded her own company. She has performed all over Europe, the US and Canada, Australia and Asia. She has a hybrid professional practice and in her shows, she mixes dance and movement with visual art, technology, language and theory.
Between 2009 and 2012 Ingvartsen created a series of shows without human performers: The Artificial Nature Series. She then turned the opposite direction with The Red Pieces which centred on the human body, focusing on nudity, sexuality and the political body. In 2019 she premiered Moving in Concert, an abstract group choreography about the way human life has become intertwined with technology on the one hand and natural material on the other.
Mette Ingvartsen was an artist-in-residence at Kaaitheater in Brussels (2012-2016) and at Volksbühne Berlin. She has worked and performed with Xavier Le Roy, Bojana Cvejic, Jan Ritsema and Boris Charmatz. She has taken part in collective research projects like the artists’ platform EVERYBODYS (2005-2010) and the Six Months, One Location educational project (2008). She also organised the performative conference The Permeable Stage (2016).
There are no seats during this performance, the audience walks through the set.
Extra
Choreo-Dramaturgy of the Virus:
A conversation on Mette Ingvartsen’s The Dancing Public and beyond
October 4, 2022 14:00-16:00 TR Schouwburg
Theater Rotterdam is honored to welcome Mette Ingvartsen for a public talk on the occasion of her performance The Dancing Public in the frame of 2022 Feeling Curious? Festival. Taking The Dancing Public as our starting point, we will discuss Ingvartsen’s art of body and movement to elucidate her recurring methods and themes. The conversation will be led by Dr. Eylül Fidan Akinci, the artistic dramaturg of Theatre Rotterdam.
Ingvartsen’s performances bridge profound philosophical and political concerns of our time with strong corporeal, visual, and acoustic design on stage. Ingvartsen works in series that complement and complicate central questions around biopolitics—the government of life in its most material and biological forms, which Michel Foucault theorized almost half a century ago and which still determines our global experience in the wake of COVID-19 pandemic. Ingvartsen interrogates how we deal with the contemporary forms of power from within her choreography and dramaturgy: How do the nonhuman beings transform humans and the world, and how can they take the center stage in dance? How does the late capitalism shape our affects, desires, and sociality, and what does it do to our control of our bodies? What could be the kinesthetic ways of restructuring our agency and asserting freedom?
Akinci’s doctoral research has focused on the themes of posthumanism and agency in choreo-dramaturgical practices of transnational and transgenerational women choreographers including Mette Ingvartsen. Akinci’s article “Mette’s Pharmacy: An immunitary detour into contaminated publics” is forthcoming in Performance Research Journal 27:1.
Team
Concept & uitvoering Mette Ingvartsenc Lichtontwerp Minna Tiikkainenc Decorontwerp Mette Ingvartsen & Minna Tiikkainenc Muziekarrangementen Mette Ingvartsen & Anne van de Starc Kostuums Jennifer Defays Dramaturgie Bojana Cvejić Franse vertaling Gilles Amalvi Technisch directeur Hans Meijer Geluidstechniek Anne van de Star Algemene leiding Ruth Collier Productrie & administratie Joey Ng Muziek Affkt feat. Sutja Gutierrez, Scanner, Radio Boy, LCC, VII Circle, Kangding Ray, Paula Temple, Ron Morelli, Valanx, Anne van de Star Productie Great Investment vzw
Ondersteund door Fondation d’entreprise Hermès in het kader van het New Settings Program, Bikubenfonden Coproductie PACT Zollverein (Essen), Kaaitheater (Brussel), Festival d’Automne (Parijs), Tanzquartier (Wenen), SPRING Performing Arts Festival (Utrecht), Kunstencentrum Vooruit (Gent), Les Hivernalles (Avignon), Charleroi danse centre chorégraphique de Wallonie – Bruxelles, NEXT festival, Dansens Hus Oslo Met de steun van Kunstencentrum Buda (Kortrijk) Met financiële steun van De Vlaamse Overheid, de Deense Kunstraad & De Vlaamse Gemeenschapscommissie (VGC)