Author Archives: Esther

Fäden

Fäden – Ivana Müller & Dance On Ensemble & Actors of Münchner Kammerspiele, Münchner Kammerspiele (cancelled because of the Coronavirus)

KAT VÁLASTUR

Kat Válastur is a Berlin-based choreographer and performer. She studied at the Hellenic School of Dance, received a Fulbright Scholarship to study at Trisha Brown’s studio in New York, and gained a Masters degree from the SODA Masters Program at the Inter-University Centre for Dance in Berlin.

Fragmentation, diverted architectures, time lapses, entropy and virtuality are some of the concepts she addresses in her dance works. Her creative process involves diagrams, hand-drawn scores and texts which she creates for each new work.

From 2013-2014 she was a grantee artist in the educational program of the Institut für Raumexperimente, an educational research project by Ólafur Elíasson in collaboration with the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK). During the program, she began researching her new series of choreographies The marginal sculptures of Newtopia. The series was co-produced and presented by HAU Hebbel am Ufer and includes the works GLAND (2014) and Ah! Oh! A contemporary ritual (2014). It was completed in 2016 with OILinity, a poetic piece on western societies’ problematic dependence on crude oil and its dire consequences for humanity and nature.

Kat Válastur’s work is presented internationally. In 2016 she was acclaimed as a promising talent for dance by the magazine “tanz” and in 2017, she was a nominee for the George-Tabori-Award.

ULTRA CENSORED
Concept, Montage & Sound: Kat Válastur
Feat. Brit Rodemund
Premiere: 28th February 2018, DANCE ON Festival, HAU Hebbel am Ufer | Berlin

  © Kat Válastur

In Ultra censored the female portrait becomes a field of mystification. The ten-minute film shows Brit Rodemund going through a detailed description of the birth of her daughter while the camera focuses on her facial expressions and gestures. Shot in slow motion, the film takes us into a ciphered universe of gestures in a mythical dimension. Like a contemporary Sphinx with the typical characteristics of beautification, she articulates the enigma of what it is to be a human being in the present tense, while her image is reflected in our eyes.

JOHANNES WIELAND

Johannes Wieland hails from Berlin, earned his BFA at the Amsterdam University of the Arts and worked in various companies with an extensive array of choreographers before going to perform as a principal at the Béjart Ballet Lausanne.

Ready for a radical change, he then relocated to New York City where he received his MFA in contemporary dance and choreography at NYU Tisch School of the Arts in 2002.
His company johannes wieland, founded in New York that same year, facilitated the foundation for his body of work and since 2006 he holds a permanent position as the artistic director and choreographer at the Staatstheater Kassel. Aside from choreographing and teaching for companies and universities his critically acclaimed pieces have been invited to tour internationally for festivals and events. He is a 1st prize winner of the Kurt Jooss prize, and has been awarded numerous other prizes, recognitions, scholarships and grants. Johannes is a nominee for the German theater prize DER FAUST in 2016 for his creation you will be removed.

In 2017 Johannes Wieland created the piece show to be true for the DANCE ON ENSEMBLE and the Swedish company Age On Stage/Charlotta Öfverholm. Further he created a new intergenerational duet especially for the DANCE ON Festival 2018: an encounter of two dancers – Evangelos Poulinas and his former teacher at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Gus Solomons Jr., who was born in 1938. They previously collaborated on Wieland’s trio one (2004), a meditation on life and mortality in which Wieland shared the stage with Solomons and Keith Sabado.

MIND ERASER II
Choreografie: Johannes Wieland
Mit: Gus Solomons Jr., Evangelos Poulinas
Produktion: DANCE ON / DIEHL+RITTER, Dank an das Staatstheater Kassel
Premiere: 28 February 2018, DANCE ON Festival, HAU Hebbel am Ufer | Berlin

© Jubal Battisti

Ty Boomershine

Ty Boomershine was born in the USA in 1968 and studied dance at the Fort Hayes School for the Performing Arts in Columbus, Ohio, completing his studies with a Bachelor of Fine Arts Magna Cum Laude from Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri.

His own choreographic works have been presented at Movement Research and Danspace Project in New York, as well as at OT301 and the Holland Festival in Amsterdam. Since 2007 he has acted as Lucinda Childs artistic assistant staging her works and assisting her on various projects around the world. He worked as rehearsal director and tour manager for Nicole Beutler / nbprojects and for Pere Faura. At ICKamsterdam, he undertook curatorial and organisational tasks as well as rehearsal management.

In New York he danced with Yvonne Rainer, Lucinda Childs, Dan Wagoner, DANCENOISE, Gus Solomons Jr., Bill T. Jones, Stanley Love, Ton Simons and the Merce Cunningham repertory ensemble. In the Netherlands he worked with Rotterdam Dance Group, Karin Post, Leine Roebana, Giulia Mureddu, Emio Greco | PC and Nicole Beutler. From 2009 – 2015 he performed in and was responsible for the staging of Lucinda Childs iconic works Dance and Available Light. In 2012 he performed as a featured soloist and acted as rehearsal director in the remounting and subsequent 4 year world tour of Robert Wilson and Philip Glass’s opera Einstein on the Beach.

He has been a member of the Dance On Ensemble since its inception in 2015 and became Artistic Director in 2019.

Javier Arozena

Javier Arozena developed his artistic practice since 2001 as a performer, creator and teacher in Spanish, European and North American companies and contexts. Member of Dance On Ensemble (Berlin) since 2020, he can be seen in Works In Silence by Lucinda Childs, Fäden by Ivana Müller, Kiss the one we are by HIATUS/Daniel Linehan and Mellowing by Christos Papadopoulos, among others.

Since 2019 he forms and co-directs together with the architect Gino Senesi the creative tandem javier arozena cía. (la compañía) with a repertoire of choreographic works for stages and other performable spaces. Their latest project is porvenir.

Since 2022 he curates Live Arts Public Program POR ASALTO in TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, where he curated the exhibition Este puede ser el lugar, performar el museo (This might be the place, performing the museum) together with Natalia Álvarez Simó in 2023.

Arozena was awarded as Best Performer in Masdanza Festival (2020) and by Barcelona’s Critics Award Edition 2024 as Best Dance Performer for VU.

Alba Barral Fernández

Alba Barral Fernández was born in Lugo, Spain, in 1979. She trained in contemporary dance at Espazo de Danza Universitario in Santiago de Compostela and later she moved to the Netherlands, where she graduated with a Bachelor in Dance from ArteZ University of the Arts in Arnhem.

During the following years she worked with the companies LeineRoebana and Suzy Blok, both based in Amsterdam. In 2006 she moved to Barcelona and danced with SenzaTempo Teatrodanza (Inés Boza). She has been a member of Thomas Noone Dance (Barcelona) since 2008, dancing works by Thomas Noone, Roni Haver/Guy Weizman, Johannes Wieland and Jo Strömgren (this last one in collaboration with Swedish dance company Norrdans). Since 2012 she has also been part of the project Camaralucida (Barcelona) under the direction of Lautaro Reyes.

She is currently working as rehearsal director for Thomas Noone Dance and as an independent artist with Javier Arozena Cia, Quim Bigas and La Veronal, Marcos Morau, touring with them internationally. Parallel to her dance career, Alba became a certified Gyrotonic trainer in 2016. She has been a member of the Dance On Ensemble since 2022.

Ziv Frenkel

Ziv Frenkel, born in 1962 in the Kibbutz Beit-Alfa in Israel, is a dancer and choreographer. From 1988 to 1995, he was a permanent member of the Kibbutz Dance Company under the direction of Yehudit Arnon. He then danced at the Bremen Theater from 1995 to 1999 under Susanne Linke. Between 1999 and 2008, he worked in the Choreografisches Theater Johann Kresnik, initially at the Volksbühne Berlin and later at the Theater Bonn. In 1996, he co-founded the steptext dance project in Bremen.

Since 2008, Frenkel has worked as a freelance artist. His artistic work has been particularly shaped by long-term collaborations with artists from various disciplines. His most important collaborators include choreographers Rosamund Gilmore, Valenti Rocamora i Tora, Yoshiko Waki (Bodytalk Münster), Helge Letonja (steptext dance project Bremen), Julia Keren Turbahn, Angie Hiesl + Roland Kaiser as well as dancer Anne Minetti, composer Stepha Schweiger, sound designer Florian Tippe, artist Christoph Dahlhausen and photographers Axel Largo and Pedro Malinowski. In addition to his dance work, Frenkel has also performed in theater and film. Since 2022, he is a member of the Dance On Ensemble.