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TANZ BREMEN 2020

From 15 – 23 May 2020, TANZ Bremen presents an especially wide range of contemporary international dance at different venues: 19 productions and a comprehensive supporting programme turn Bremen into the centre of contemporary dance for nine days. In all its productions, the festive shows that origin, belonging and identity are extremely multifaceted and partially even contradictory concepts that rarely do justice to a complex reality – a highly diverse and varied reality, on the dance stage and in real life. It is dance that as the most corporeal of all artistic genres has the special capacity to reflect on and question our images of the human physique. It has long been presenting us not only trained dancers that correspond with allegedly perfect body ideals. Instead, contemporary choreographers are interested in the shape of the human body in all its diversity and differences. They critically question our notions of what a body must look like and what appears to be inscribed in it: gender, age and descent, wounds or impairments, but also ethnic attributions, social constellations and conventions. TANZ Bremen 2020 centres on this development and places a special focus on productions in which diversity is expressed not only through various techniques and styles, but in part specifically as well through the dancers on stage.

And: TANZ Bremen 2020 is a festival with a pronounced female perspective, for 16 of the 19 works bring artistic positions of women to the stage.

The varied programme includes pieces dealing with constructions of identity and role stereotypes. Stories of life are told from the perspective of older women, and the treatment of tradition, of what is foreign and one’s own is at issue. To this end, the choreographers make use of the most various stylistic means: at times highly concentrated and purist, at others jarring and opulent, at times athletic and virtuoso, at others anarchical and filled with wicked humour.

For FOCUS: CANADA, TANZ Bremen has invited newcomers who have performed rarely or never at all in Germany. The productions of the female choreographers often deal with the concept of freedom, but also with social mechanisms that lead to exclusion. Themes that their male colleagues have also taken up in the festival programme in their search for a sense of social belonging or in visions of self-determination.

The international spectrum of the festival is complemented by productions from the lively dance scene in Bremen. TANZ Bremen dedicates a further focus to numerous current productions by women ‘made in Bremen’ and has therefore expanded its cooperation with various venues of the city.

In this festival edition, the performances will again be supplemented by an exciting supporting programme: with introductions, physical prologues, discussions, workshops, films, talks with the audience, and parties.

In all its productions, the festival demonstrates that origin, belonging and identity are very multifaceted and at times even contradictory concepts that rarely do justice to a complex reality. So let us remain open and above all curious about a highly diverse and variegated reality, on the stage of dance and in real life.

 

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RUBBERBAND

EVER SO SLIGHTLY

OPENING

The world revolves faster and faster, getting louder and more confusing. EVER SO SLIGHTLY portrays an increasingly disoriented society that has to deal with the chaos it creates. In a virtuoso manner, the Canadian-based choreographer Victor Quijada combines elements of hip-hop and martial-art moves with contemporary dance.

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FASO DANSE THÉÂTRE

SERGE AIMÉ COULIBALY & ROKIA TRAORÉ

KIRINA

KIRINA is the name of a battle of the Mandinka people in the 12th century possessing great importance for West Africa. The hero Suniata defeated a tyrant and established a better rule. In his eponymous piece, the West African choreographer Serge Aimé Coulibaly transfers this epos to the present.

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EUN-ME AHN COMPANY

NORTH KOREA DANCE

For her piece NORTH KOREA DANCE, she copied, distorted and potentiated the material with her own imagination. Featuring glitzy costumes that remind one more of colourful revues and glamorous pop concerts than of a military regime, Eun Me Ahn’s spectacular interpretation of North Korean dances finds its way to the stage

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NÚRIA GUIU SAGARRA/UNUSUAL SYMPTOMS

FUTURALGIA

PREMIERE

For her solo piece Likes, Núria Guiu Sagarra came up with a gaudy pop style that questions the status of the body and its representation – in an increasingly virtual and globalized world that threatens to standardize tastes and thoughts. She succeeded in presenting a refreshing perspective on the presence of the body in the digital age.

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GALIT LISS

GO!

YES MANIFESTO FOR THE ELDERLY BODY

18 dancers, mothers and grandmothers, women in their mid-60s to mid-80s. They move in a calm, careful and at times dreamy manner. All have a passion in common: they would loved to have become and remained dancers.

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CLARA FUREY

COSMIC LOVE

GERMAN PREMIERE

Based on the idea that space as such is a vacuum, Clara Furey explores the energies, forces and dynamics that fill and define it in her first group choreography. Therefore, the white podium that seems to protrude from dark nothingness is empty. I

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ANDREA PEÑA & ARTISTS

UNTITLED I

EUROPEAN PREMIERE

Caught in repetition, caught in space and time: as an academically trained industrial designer and choreographer, Andrea Peña is interested in relentlessly recurring motion sequences of everyday life that are shaped by objects.

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VANESSA GOODMAN

CONTAINER

EUROPEAN PREMIERE

Somewhere between Blade Runner and Miley Cyrus, between femme fatale and cyborg: Vanessa Goodman stands alone – but by no means lost – on the empty stage.

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CIE PAR TERRE/ANNE NGUYEN DANCE COMPANY

À MON BEL AMOUR

How do we define beauty? How identity? How do we perceive an individual, a couple and a collective? These are the questions the French-Vietnamese choreographer addresses in her current production.

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SYNERGY 2020

HOSTED BY UNUSUAL SYMPTOMS

Urban and contemporary dance styles meet live music of various genres and performative improvisation, when teams of dancers from all over Germany and international special guests compete against each other.

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BIRGIT FREITAG

VERMUTUNGEN ÜBER (…)

PREMIERE

What features are decisive for the impression an unknown person makes on you? Is it the age, gender, skin colour, origin, and height? With two dancers who didn’t know each other before the project began, Birgit Freitag in her most recent piece VERMUTUNGEN ÜBER (...) seeks other ways of conceiving persons.

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OLIVIA HYUNSIN KIM/DDANDDARAKIM

YELLOW BANANA

Olivia Hyunsin Kim celebrates the 250-millionth anniversary of the Eurasian Plate. The German-Korean celebrates a reconciliation ritual between the two continents, focusing on a quite familiar fruit: the banana, which is originally from Southeast Asia, and thus Olivia Hyunsin Kim herself.

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DANA MICHEL

YELLOW TOWEL

As a child, Dana Michel often wrapped herself a yellow towel around her head to look blond and like the others. This memory feeds her autobiographically inspired solo.

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OF CURIOUS NATURE

CHEER

OF CURIOUS NATURE is the centrepiece of the dance development concept TanzRAUM Nord, committed to boosting dance in northern Germany.

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JUNGES.THEATER BREMEN/ANTJE PFUNDTNER

ICH BIN NICHT DU

Who am I? How do I want to be? Can you easily reinvent yourself by simply claiming that you are someone else? What if a pig mooed or a cow? Then is it a pig or a cow?

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JUNGES.THEATER BREMEN/BIRGIT FREITAG

FÜR VIER

Two adults and two youths meet on stage and in a playful manner raise important questions of life. Where are you from? What invigorates you? How do you imagine your future?

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JENNI PERGAMENT & FRIENDS

LABEL ME

What do we perceive as aesthetic, what as beautiful and what as normal? And: how much deviation from the norm do we tolerate? The steel actors of the sculptor Robert Schad and three dancers are the protagonists of this unusual choreography that Jenni Pergament created specifically for the Gerhard-Marcks-Haus.

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ANNA HUBER

GELENK SKIZZEN – ZEIT SPUREN

What visible and invisible traces do movement, sound and presence leave behind in space and in one’s memory?

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TANZBAR_BREMEN

KÖRPER IN BEWEGUNG

KÖRPER IN BEWEGUNG is a work that subtly retraces Lassnig’s ‘sensations in the housing of the body’ with own artistic means.

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