DISTORTION – VERZERRUNG by Constanza Macras

 is a production by HipHop Academy Hamburg and Kampnagel.

“A choreography by Macras is finished when the stage lies in ruins at the end.” (DIE ZEIT). Argentine-born Constanza Macras devises choreographies that have been described as energetic, powerful, wild and colourful but they are also serious commentaries on topics critical of society. In Distortion, Constanza Macras takes the basic moves of hip hop and deforms them to make expressive imagery in a contemporary choreography. Together with eight performers from the HipHop Academy Hamburg, she sounds out the possibilities of what can be physically portrayed, making the dancing bodies into a vehicle for a visually stunning narrative.

PREMIERE
DO 14.02. 19:00 K6 Kampnagel, Hamburg

OPEN FOR EVERYTHING is a travel through the stagnation of Roma communities in Europe to whom chances to work like any other citizen are rather low, where itinerant traditions have been replaced by sedentary life beside the uprootedness of the group of dancers that move around the world following working opportunities.

Since 2010 Macras has been researching the different ways of life, dance styles and music of the Roma in Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. In the course of this work she has brought together a large ensemble comprising Roma musicians and performers, amateurs of different ages, and dancers from her company DorkyPark to perform in her new show OPEN FOR EVERYTHING. It is with great aplomb that these very different people recount their lives and their dreams, their despair and their passions. This journey uses music and dance to lead us through the lives of the European Roma of today, seizing upon, playing with, and depicting with humour the prejudices, clichés, misunderstandings, similarities, traditions, discrimination, poverty and violence. Who is making use of whose prejudices? And just who are the true nomads of the 21^st century?

A production by CONSTANZA MACRAS | DorkyPark and the GOETHE-INSTITUT. In co-production with Wiener Festwochen, New Stage of National Theatre Prague, Trafó House of Contemporary Arts Budapest, International Theatre Festival Divadelná Nitra, Hebbel am Ufer Berlin, Kampnagel Hamburg, HELLERAU – European Center for the Arts Dresden, Dansens Hus Stockholm and Zürcher Theater Spektakel.

Supported by the Capital Cultural Fund and the Governing Mayor of Berlin – Department for Cultural Affairs and Open Society Foundations – with contribution of the Arts and Culture Program of Budapest.

In collaboration with Workshop Foundation. Supported by Czech Center Berlin.

These questions are dealt with in mythology and target group analyses alike. Constanza Macras and her international ensemble approach these and many other themes, these inner and outward trips, in their new production I’m Not the Only One. As always with their works, at issue are the consequences that result when various cultures clash; we assimilate and integrate everything, but how much do we really understand?

I’m Not the Only One develops a piece of fiction that takes the actors’ various motivations for departure as a starting point. Like the heroes in fairy tales and myths, they are subject to a transformation, each in his own individual way. In this way, myth and reality, archetypes and autobiography mix. And again and again we are faced with the question: what and where was home anyway?

I’m Not the Only One consists of two parts shown on two different evenings, each part with a different cast. Both may be viewed on their own.

Agoraphobia is the fear of certain, especially public and vast spaces, as well as of masses of people. In the Western world agoraphobia is actually the phobia that is diagnosed most often. It causes panic attacks, in many cases people no longer dare to go out of their homes. Although medicine has a tendency to consider it as a psychological, even physiological defect of the individual some critical studies point out to a necessity to look for the reasons for this illness in the nature and in the circumstances of the space itself – meaning to analyse the city as a possible cause.

In HERE/AFTER Constanza Macras along with four performers and one musician seeks to find out more about this clinical pattern with all its peculiarities like hyperventilation, panic attacks, dizziness and disorientation. Does everyday life in a metropolis pose a threat to the people? Are panic attacks in a shopping mall not a natural human form of defense, and why do they have to be treated in a therapy? This play explores the relation between anonymity and growing isolation, of the individual and urban life, of public spaces and their pathological manifestations. We will see flats with nightmarish narrowness, we will encounter two women who live together and who come up with all kinds of excuses to convince one another not having to leave home anymore. There will be a lonely musician whose only dream to become a rockstar ends with his terrible fear of big gatherings of people; a foreigner who never speaks; and a delivery man who is the only link between these people and the dreaded “outside”. Never before has it been so easy to be “by oneself” in a society which makes a confrontation with the “outside” avoidable through the sheer endless possibilities of communicating via the internet, chatrooms and delivery services. And actually what is it out there that one absolutely has to experience live?

A production by CONSTANZA MACRAS | DorkyPark and the Schaubuehne am Lehniner Platz Berlin and in co-production with HELLERAU – Europaeisches Zentrum der Künste Dresden, Maison des Arts de Creteil, the Perspectives Festival Saarbruecken and tanzhaus nrw. Funded by the Hauptstadtkulturfonds and the Regierender Buergermeister Berlin – Senatskanzlei – Kulturelle Angelegenheiten.

In “Berlin Elsewhere”, strangers meet at a place of mental captivity. They’re suffering from common social maladies, neurosis, bipolarity, fetishism, and fetishism of commodities. A place that is somewhere between exclusion, madness, and struggle. Madness and segregation are presented as a consequence of one another and mirroring factors. Segregation is a form of madness and madness promotes segregation. What kind of Madness does our society permit before someone is confined? What is confinement in the era of medication? Many actions that required confinement in former times no longer do, but our society still shares the assumption with the classic era that the loss of civil rights are akin to madness, immigration, and poverty. There is a strong parallel in the random questions that are posed in the evaluation of a patient on the verge of being sectioned as “mad” and those posed to an immigrant applying for residency in the EU after marrying a European partner. The daily mechanisms of exclusion start in childhood and are an expression of the society we live in. The characters confine themselves in their daily acts of segregation, as one says: “You can’t just do yoga all the time, you need to greet the doorman once in a while”. Interdependencies between poverty, madness and civil rights have not changed for centuries, it seems. The city of Berlin is the perfect example of a “locked up” and “excluded” city, where segregation, madness, and confinement have historically played a strong role: Unemployed people from the new federal states who were unable to get a foot in the door in the years following reunification; Immigrants who studied in East Berlin and were able to live in the city legally but lost their civil rights with the fall of the Wall, were stranded without the option to return to “their” countries. Passengers par excellence, like the medieval ships of fools, whose passengers did not fit the fixed social norms and were abandoned to the endless waters. Who can tell for certain who was on board of those ships? We’re left with the uneasy presentiment that a long lost ship might one day return, or that such ships might again be created, clandestinely, and set off anew, again and again. As a consolation we will always have the BBC to show that it is much worse somewhere else. The madness can begin, in Berlin Elsewhere.

In this special collaboration, three performers from Constanza Macras’ company will team up with dancers from Johannesburg to reflect on the first African World Cup.

Macras sees Johannesburg as the country’s premier urban landscape, representing the space where the evolving story of the new South Africa is most fully played out. The city is representational of both the Utopian dreams of the reconciled Rainbow Nation and the dystopia of an urban space under siege.

Typical of such a growing metropolis is that an integral part of urban society can be seen in the divide between the anxious rich and the desperately poor. Patterns of differentiation reinforce structural inequalities deeply integrated in the cityscape – but also reflect an emergent spatial logic governing the organisation of the uses and meaning of the urban space after apartheid.

The piece looks at the meeting of characters promoted by the public transport system and the role of football in politics and economy.

It is not the first time that a soccer World Cup is taking place in a socially or politically charged environment, where it could play a role in covering, accelerating or confronting the actual situations in the country. Another example is the 1978 World Cup in Argentina where Macras was born. Will the euphoria of the event reconcile differences? Or will it accentuate existing conflicts? How accessible are its benefits to everybody?

These are the questions at the heart of The Offside Rules, which forms part of the ‘Football Meets Culture’ programme being promoted by the Goethe Institute, the German Embassy and their partners.

JUNE 2013

3rd
FOREST: THE NATURE OF CRISIS
PUBLIC SHOWING
STUDIO 44 | 8pm
Berlin
GERMANY

20th / 21st
OPEN FOR EVERYTHING
Ludwigsburger Schlossfestspiele
Ludwigsburg
GERMANY

28th / 29th
DISTORTION
HELLERAU-Europäisches Zentrum der Künste
Dresden
GERMANY

JULY 2013

6th
OPEN FOR EVERYTHING
Sommerblut Festival
Köln
GERMANY

AUGUST 2013

10th
PREMIERE
FOREST: THE NATURE OF CRISIS
site-specific: Müggelwald
Berlin
GERMANY

12th / 13th / 14th / 17th / 18th / 19th
FOREST: THE NATURE OF CRISIS
site-specific: Müggelwald
Berlin
GERMANY

NOVEMBER 2013

30th
OPEN FOR EVERYTHING
Theater Freiburg
Freiburg
GERMANY

MEGALOPOLIS is not a specific but rather a metaphorical place. The scene is a city under the influence of globalisation. This city is characterised by the illegibility of today’s megacities, that were born into chaos. Its characteristics are unbridled growth, decay and an infinite dissolution. Tight and narrow, the city dissolves the borders between private and public spheres and allows them to all but disappear. At the same time this borderlessness forces us to perceive the city as a collage which is made up of innumerable biographical bits. The battle between two street vendors fighting for the best spot today demonstrates an existential confrontation that tomorrow is already forgotten. Megacities are a paradigm for the spaces in which people live together without knowing one another. The ever-present surveillance systems do not only create constantly watched beings but also a different sort of self-perception. The body of a person changes itself into an expressive instrument which creates and destroys systems and rules. Which interactions still have any kind of validity? Will urban development follow principles, which are totally unknown to us? Is the apparent decay of social relationships a cause or a consequence of the signs of decay in our cities? MEGALOPOLIS is a promise and a curse. MEGALOPOLIS is a shining city. MEGALOPOLIS is an uncontrollable construct, constantly in motion.

The district of Neukoelln houses more migrants than natives and is one of Berlinís trouble hotspots. For years, the social problems have been suppressed and concealed. However, the riots in the suburbs of Paris in 2005 have also drawn attention to troubled neighbourhoods in Berlin, such as Neukoelln.

Based on her experiences with the young dancers in the production “Scratch Neukoelln” at HAU1 Berlin in 2003, Constanza Macras offers the now teenagers of Neukoelln another stage in ìHell on Earth”. They tell from their live experiences, not from a childrenís perspective, but rather from a young adultís point of view: of hopes and troubles becoming adults. Of daily endured discrimination. Of the wish to adapt. Of the problems accompanying that wish.

Of particular interest is the development of a gender identity in this production, one of the main points in adolescence. It especially focuses on the evolvement of young women since they have to face more limits then their male counterparts. An additional theme is the interference of female and male concepts of the body and of gender. Thus, the question is: How do adolescent teenagers with an immigrant background cope with the multilayered and “Hell on Earth” therefore affords them room to thrive and present themselves ñ an option they are often deprived of.

A production by Constanza Macras | DorkyPark and HELLERAU – Europäisches Zentrum der Kuenste Dresden in coproduction with HEBBEL Theater am Ufer Berlin and Théatre de la Place Liege sponsored by Kulturstiftung des Bundes and the Regierenden Buergermeister von Berlin – Senatskanzlei – Kulturelle Angelegenheiten.

“As tenderly as you close the eyes of the Dead,

as tenderly you have to open the eyes of the Living.”

Jean Cocteau

Around 400 B.C., Sophocles created a stage play based on the ancient Myth of Oedipus tyrannous. 2400 years later this play is still relevant. Perceived and interpreted throughout the ages – from Aristotle and Freud to Lacan and Bloch, Oedipus remains a cipher for the guilty, for the violation of taboo. He is the prototype of the individual investigating his own truth and destiny through pain, finally being able to recognize it and accept it.

Friedrich Schiller referred to Oedipus’ remorseless self-questioning as a tragic analysis, which inspired Freud’s use of the term “psychoanalysis” at beginning of the 20th century. Not least inspired by Freud and his work on Oedipus, along with the ideas of Modernity, Igor Stravinsky and Jean Cocteau created their own version of the myth in Paris in 1926.

An hour-long opera for male choir, vocal soloists and symphony orchestra: Oedipus Rex

Sophocles closes his drama with a chorus that warns of human hubris:

“Therefore thou shall look on the day that is last to remain. And thou shall not bless any mortal, unless he gained the goal of life without suffering.”

In response, assuming pain to be an essential component of life, Cocteau and Stravinsky demand compassion and sympathy for man’s suffering. Their chorus closes:

“Farewell Oedipus, we did love you.”

In regards to their artistic direction, Cocteau and Stravinsky’s idea was that compassion and solidarity, as the only position against the solitude of the individual facing existence, are fundamental for the performance’s development.

At the same time, the forlorn, fallen and hollowed out industrial set design parallels the archaism of Oedipus Rex as witness to a past epoch. Constanza Macras designs tableaux vivants in her choreography that are inspired by the photographic hyperrealism of Gregory Crewdson and the staged photographs of Jeff Wall. The protagonist, Oedipus, is embodied by different performers, both male and female, in different scenes, which amplifies the disassociation of Oedipus Rex. Oedipus Rex, consciously conceived by Cocteau and Stravinsky as musical theater beyond the confines of opera, is predestined to examine new forms of presentation in new places. At the same time, Macras’ production will be a premiere; the narrator´s lines were translated by none other than Hans Magnus Enzensberger specifically for this performance.

The stage design will be created by the Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota. We are very proud to continue this very successful collaboration. Last year we realized with Chiharu Shiota the project In Silence at the Kanagawa Art Foundation Yokohama.