5 Works on Ritual and Repetition
Saturday, 2 April 8:00 pm
Tatwerk | Performative Forschung

Hasenheide 9
Gewerbehof, 2nd Courtyard, Aufgang 1, 3. OG
U7 & U8 Hermannplatz

 

Space/Time’s opening event at the Tatwerk includes two live performances and three video works which explore the varied effects that ritual and repetition have on our experience of time.

Gali Kinkulkin opens with a performance that calls back to the parallel origins of video and body art, with simple, transparent choreographic techniques that probe her own physical limits. The screening portion of the program features two short video works which focus documentary techniques on absurd and human physical rituals involved in both sports and labor; also included is a performance for video by Karin Felbermayr which repurposes found gestures for a subversive, anti-authoritarian character profile.

The program concludes with the latest installment in a series of interdisciplinary performances by Claudia Garbe and Johnny Chang, whose movement-music compositions explore the effect of gradual transformations and extended durations.

Featuring:

Leave the Keys and Go 
Gali Kinkulkin, music by Ferdinand Breil
A dance examining exhaustion and identity.

GOGOGO! 
Evanthia Afstralou
Short documentary meets YouTube video mashup.

Person #24 
Karin Felbermayr
Choreographic cycle of gestures for video.

Werkzaamheid
Oscar van der Kruis
Video composition of the ritual movements of labor.

Slow Changes #3
Claudia Garbe and Johnny Chang
An ongoing series of performances designed around slowness, silence, and minimal shifts.

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Gali Kinkulkin – Leave the Keys and Go 

With Leave the Keys and Go, the artist employs continuous, repetitious movements which test her own physical limits, raising questions about how one can use the body, which contains an infinite amount of information, in order to explore the complexity of cultural-identity in relation to self-identity. Body as an empty vessel; the range of identities, the bow of qualities, the volume of responsibilities, all resonates in it. By focusing on continues physical tasks she is “limiting” the body which allows to explore the qualities that are being awakened by it. Is there a complex identity, one that allows a neutral and objective view of the world?

Gali Kinkulkin is a permanent resident of Lake Studios Berlin- an artist run dance, production and performance place. Since 2014 Gali has been performing and teaching in Berlin. Her dance research is being influenced by improvisation and the Axis-Syllabus method. In her work she deals with the honesty and the courage to distinguish between personal and universal, between awareness and numbness and between right and wrong. Gali uses physical journeys which examine awareness and human responsibility.  Her works have presented in around Europe and in Israel.

Music by Ferdinand Breil.

Evanthia Afstralou – GOGOGO!

After spending several months living alongside a community of amateur boxers, the artist created this affectionate portrait of their training rituals, struggles, and frequent failures. Half documentary, half re-appropriated YouTube mashup, GOGOGO! is an orchestrated spectacle of everyday aesthetics, chasing a long-anticipated climax that is never reached.

Evanthia Afstralou received her BA degree from Wimbledon College of the Arts in London. Her videos are short clips of ‘the choreography of everyday life’. By filming people performing everyday activities–tying shoes, making coffee, flossing teeth–Afstralou transforms mundane rituals into remarkable portraits of human life. As a filmmaker who “makes nothing  happen” by employing methods of non-interference and non-objectified materials, she claims to be “looking for the mouse at the back of the room that is not there.”

Karin Felbermayr – Person #24

Since 2005, Karin Felbermayr’s video performances have developed diverse medium-form relations which are closely related to the traditions of post-ideological, anti-authoritarian art practices. With Person #24, the artist performs a choreographic cycle composed of gestures taken from perfume advertisements, while employing several physical and technical masking techniques. The performance probes aspects of concealment, identity, and paradoxes.

Excerpt from: Sabeth Buchmann: Woman without Qualities / Art with Qualities. In: Performative Elements, Verbrecher Verlag, Berlin 2007. Translation: Ann Robertson.

If we pursue Felbermayr’s motto “Stereotype as a Masquerade”, then ‘Mask‘ stands for that which determines the production conditions of identity (as men and/or women). Just as Butler maintains that deviation from the norm is constitutive of the norm itself, it is the distorting and fictionalizing appearance of gender characters which suggests the existence of a supposedly ‘submerged’ hidden truth, but this in turn is only and imagined image, one we cannot actually see, but are only able to project. Consequently, rather than implying any certainties about the empirical reality of gender identities, “Mask”, “Gender Gamble” and “Stereotype as a Masquerade” demonstrate to us that these are unstable ‘repetitions’ of image citations: ranging from Spiderman through cyborgs to masked demonstrators or Frantz Fanon’s “Black Skin White Masks”, such images turn out to have superimposed, multi-layered, sometimes contradictory levels of meaning with countless breaks. Nevertheless, this does not inevitably restrict the ideological effect of media cultural, political and theoretical narrations which are evoked by the mask topos. …”

Oscar van der Kruis – Werkzaamheid

A documentary about the ritualistic physical movements of industrial and agricultural laborers in the Netherlands and Germany.

Claudia Garbe and Johnny Chang – Slow Changes #3

In a time, when we have to process vast amounts of information and absorb constant pressure to increase our achievements and speed, Claudia Garbe and Johnny Chang engage in their duo ”slow changes #3” with gradual transformations and extended durations. They explore the space which appears, if time was given to a single sound, movement of the body or common encounters.

Claudia Garbe studied Culture Studies/Performing Arts in Hildesheim and Wologda (Russia) and Choreography in Berlin at HfS ”Ernst Busch”/HZT. In 2010 she was invited for a two month residency at Critical Path, Sydney. 2011 she premiered her solo ”Into/Out of Landscape” at LaborGras, Berlin and was invited with the work to the German days of contemporary dance in Czhelabinsk (Russia). In 2013 she got a DanceWeb Scholarship at ImpulsTanz with Mentor Ivo Dimchev supported by Goethe Institut. She is a member of the interdisciplinary collective “possible.movement“.

Berlin­-based composer­/performer Johnny Chang engages in extended explorations surrounding the relationships of sound/listening and the in­between areas of improvisation, composition and performance. Johnny is part of the Wandelweiser composers collective. On­going collaborations with: Antoine Beuger, Lucio Capece, Catherine Lamb, Christian Kesten, Hannes Lingens, Radu Malfatti, Koen Nutters, Morten J Olsen, Michael Pisaro, Derek Shirley, Takako Suzuki, Stefan Thut.

TATWERK | PERFORMATIVE FORSCHUNG is a production centre and studio for the performing arts in Berlin. The artistic research focus in physical theatre, dance and performance with a particular attention to interdisciplinary projects.

TATWERK is a crossing point for artists who chose the body as material and the research as a tool for their work. Our work consists in offering an artisic exchange platform for ideas, artistic practices and projects.

Our main interest concentrates on multidisciplinary, political and poetic projects in the field of the performing arts. We are particulalry interested in the research of thematic and aestheitc tension fields beween different artistic, social and scientific disciplines. The resulting program consisting o classes, workshops and performance projects is completed by events ans festivals where chosen artists present their work in form of previews, work in progress or ready productions.

Furthermore we offer support in technical questions, in the production and PR. We open our network and activate new, unexpected connections. TATWERK | PERFORMATIVE FORSCHUNG responds to the need of many artists for an open space and pursues long term work relationships.