PERFORMANCE  NIGHT, Berlin contact festival

One of the highlights of Berlin Contact Festival will be the post-festival Performance Night.  This will be a unique chance to ride the wave initiazed of five days of  intense dancing together. The international team of professional dance artists share their performing practice in the container of contact improvisation. During the festival energy is gathered towards the performance through a laboratory of improvised scores open to all participants willing to explore the art of instant composition in a structured way. The vastness of the studio spaces of Uferstudios offers an inspiring possibility to experiment alternative set-ups for  performance. The night will be supported by improvised live music.

Our aim is to present the unique quality of CI as practice and as a form of performance. What kind of performative and esthetic choices arise from weight exchange and following the shared point of physical contact? In the spirit of improvisation we’d also like to challenge the range of expression of CI movement vocabulary through various improvisation scores which  explore parameters like slow-fast, round – sharp and chaos-symmetry to the extreme.

We are interested whether a performance can serve as a ritual, a collective experience where the role  and status of performer and viewer can be renegotiazed and mixed. Some spontaneous group activities invite the audience to be part of the composition of the space. The performance will gradually end up in an improvisation jam and celebration night.

Here you can find some of the scores we explored explained:

the Network
-this score was inspired by Aune Kallinen. While the audience entered the theatre space, the whole floor of entrance hall was covered with network of bodies lying on their bellies connected through hands and feet making small movement and sounds. The audience had to step over the bodies in order to reach the theatre space

Rolling score
group of performers are walking freely in the space, stopping, performing a simple spine roll to floor and back up. Through this they are creating different kind of constellations in the space; circles, lines, ques, geometrical figures. From this group activity can arise a separate contact improv unit, which can be a duet, trio or a kvartet. the members of both groups can be in constant change.

Acceleration score:
the original version of the score is I guess from Nancy Stark Smith. 7 people walk across the space 7 times accelerating the speed from extreme slow walk to maximum fast running. We explored several versions of this for example done with free movement and changing the space. For example starting from the middle of room towards the edges mixing also with the audience.

Moving eyes open and closed
2 different version for a group score: moving while eyes closed, stopping while eyes open and vice versa. This was guided by Mathilde Monfreux

Homescore:
performers created their homes in different corners and spots of the theater space, audience members as well other performers were invited to visit different homes.Some of them were lighted with theatre lights , some not, one home was in complete darkness, only occasional flick of light would give some orientation.

There are several photos of the event in the website of the festival in www.in-touch.es/en/in-touch-happenings/berlin/berlin-festival.html