dossier

Anna Huber & Yves Netzhammer Aufrumarbeiten im Wasserfall

Premiere: 3.3.2011, Dampfzentrale Bern, Swiss Contemporary Dance Days

Concept/choreography/dance: Anna Huber Concept/stage/ video : Yves Netzhammer Music: Martin Schtz Costume: Zuzana Ponicanova Lighting: Ursula Degen Oeil Extrieur: Andreas Storm Assistance: Petra Rusch

Aufrumarbeiten im Wasserfall is the first collaboration of the dancer/choreographer Anna Huber with the visual artist Yves Netzhammer. The impulses, rules and limits of figurative movement in real, imaginary and synthetic space are mixed up and used to test new semantic fields. Vulnerable and immediate in its physical presence, the human body is simultaneously an instrument and object of research. In its complex transformations, traditional systems of orientation shift and bend into three dimensional structures. The gap between the possible and impossible becomes the laboratory for moments rich in associations. A hovering space, a poetic landscape between imagination, concrete situations and projections. Behind a systematic set of rules with its bizarre laws, a fragile cosmos, made up of memory fragments, objects from daily life, possibilities and acts, opens up. Borders shift. Laws are upended. The focus moves from exterior space into a fragile interior. Everything hangs from a thin thread. What seems obvious is questioned. Objects of daily life become imaginary partners and projection surfaces. A figure must constantly assure itself of its own existence; in the process, it tests its own bodily laws and limits. The space must be constantly reorganized and balanced. The body transforms itself, meanings and functions shift and new fields of association open up. Body parts become independent and foreign. Worthless objects become imaginary partners; they join one another to form unexpected associations. For moments, the figure tries to flee from its loneliness with its imaginary counterparts or in a dialogue with an animated projection. How unique or replaceable, vulnerable or inviolable is an individual? What are the minimal basic needs in order to live (or survive) in a human way? The natural need for security seems to be at risk. Again and again, the search for protection begins and attempts are made to settle down, to establish oneself. Territories are demarcated. There is a necessity of drawing borders and a wish to break through them in order

P r oduction annahuber.compagnie. Coproduced by Dampfzentrale Bern, Tanzhaus Zrich Supported by Kultur Stadt Bern, SWISSLOS/Amt fr Kultur Kanton Bern, Pro Helvetia Swiss Arts Council.

to escape loneliness. To what extent can one adapt or get used to impossible situations, inhospitable places and intolerable conditions? When is a limit reached? Only loss can lead to freedom? An oscillating system opens up that wavers between numerous conditions; an in-between space, between dance and performance, projections and real space, the interior and exterior, concrete and imaginary, natural and artificial, maimed and unscathed, vulnerable and perfect, between a set of rules and anarchy, between microcosm and macrocosm. It is a precarious fluctuation between reality and fantasy, wishes and fears, danger and desire.