“Soles“ is a stage ritual, a noise-kitchen, and a dance-spell for bodies and things that cannot be contained. A band of tricksters takes us to a neverending build-up. A hole, where the order of things is turned inside-out. Organic, synthetic, and technical bodies enter cycles of shapeshifting and mutual activation, refusing to work the way they’re expected to, insisting on the right to remain ungraspable. Productivity slows down, functions fail, stability crumbles, usefulness becomes useless. No thing serves, every thing acts. Mundane turns to magic, trash to treasure. “Soles“ is an invitation to remember the innate animatedness and queerness of things and sit with tangled, unstable togetherness. It rehearses what happens when we stop taking the ground for granted. When object-subject hierarchies suspend, categories pop, and meaning keeps leaking.
Infos
- Duration: approx. 90 min.
- Language: spoken English
- World premiere
Accessibility
Accessibility of Location
Sponsors and Supporters
By and with annu mensen, Blanca Gómez Terán, Isidora Gazmuri, Till Bürgin
Costumes: Lucas Guigonis
Light Support: Laura Salerno
Production assistance: Tolja Haß
Special thanks to: Bojana Kunst, Xavier Le Roy and the Putting your Works at Work course, Andros Zins-Browne, Claire Vivianne Sobottke, Lagha Ghavam, Raha Dehghani Vinicheh, Murillo Basso, Xdzunúm Danae Trejo, Malin Harff, Morteza Zarei, Mila Pavicevic, Linda Jiayun Gao-Lenders, Johanna Mensen
Production notes and sponsors: Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm, Hessian Theatre Academy, Frankfurt Cultural Office, Friends of International Theatre
Biographies
annu mensen works in the fields of performance, choreography, installation, as well as dance and movement pedagogy and writes audiodescriptions for performing arts. Their work engages with the poetic and political dimensions of relations between human, non-human and invisible bodies, guided by an interest in magnifying the magics of mundane conditions and strange realities. Practices that shape their work include vipassana meditation, embodied anatomy and clown activism. After studying theatre studies at Leipzig University and classical dance at the Indonesian Institute of Arts in Yogyakarta, annu completed a certification in dance and movement pedagogy in Berlin. They are currently finishing the MA in Choreography and Performance at JLU Gießen with the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes Scholarship.
Blanca G. Terán is a choreographer and graphic designer based in Germany. With a background in architecture, her work moves between visual and performing arts, approaching choreography as a space for perceptual and political inquiry. Alongside her academic studies, she has pursued independent training in contemporary dance, including participation in PACAP at Forum Dança, Lisbon (2017–18), driven by a visceral passion for dance and choreography, as well as a political need to think through the body. She is currently part of the MA program Choreography and Performance (CuP) at ATW Gießen. Blanca understands choreographic practice as a meeting place for collaboration across disciplines. She develops works in solo and duo formats and has collaborated with visual artists. She has presented her works at La Poderosa and La Caldera in Barcelona; CA2M, MNCARS, La Casa Encendida, and Teatro Pradillo in Madrid; and Espaço Alkantara in Lisbon.
Isidora Gazmuri is a Chilean actress, performer and, playwriter. She studied theatre at Universidad de Chile. Throughout her career she has worked in several performances and theatre pieces, mainly as an actress and producer. Parallelly, she has started her own research in the field of movement and theatre, specifically in the relation between objects, materialities and body. First with an approach through puppets, doing a specialization with a renowned Chilean Puppet Company Viajeinmovil. Second she did an artistic residency in
CCC and studied an MA in Choreography and performance at Justus-liebig-University, Germany, with a DAAD Scholarship.
Till Bürgin (*2001 in Basel) studied Sound Arts in Bern and is currently studying Applied Theater Studies in Gießen. The focus of their artistic work lies somewhere between text and music and on the search for their mutual dissolution in performative contexts. In collaborative projects, their work varies from scoring the music to sound designing for performances, all with an ongoing interest of how sound itself can be performed.
students of the invisible
students of the invisible
things don’t stay
nor disappear.
they just hide in the air.
when the earth giggles,
they shake
secret dance
pop.
one fool.
speaks in inverted tongues
crawls through cables
falls through holes
falls, pop.
grows in kinks and curves
hatches, inverts
curves.
giggles at concrete
worships the discarded
disobeys, pop.
eight soles
four tongues
one body
one fool.
ground full of holes
things full of soles
A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient. The first cultural device was probably a recipient.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
Notes on Sensory Stimuly
- temporal darkness
- loud noises
- moment of bright light
- addressing the audience