Matteo Fargion and the other artists of the production 7 Dialogues.

MATTEO FARGION
Matteo Fargion is a composer, performer and teacher. He has worked in dance and theatre for over 25 years, collaborating with leading choreographers and directors in the UK and abroad.  For the past 15 years he has worked closely with Siobhan Davies, writing music for and performing in some of her most significant recent work, and Karl Jay Lewin. Together with Jonathan Burrows, he has made a series of 10 duets conceived, choreographed, composed, administrated and performed together. Both Sitting Duet won a 2004 New York Dance and Performance ‘Bessie’ Award, and Cheap Lecture was chosen for the prestigious 2009 Het Theater­festival in Belgium. He has also written a lot of music for theatre, especially in Germany, where he has collaborated several times with Elmar Goerden at several theatres and with Thomas Ostermeier at the Schaubühne Berlin. Matteo is also a long-time visiting member of faculty at PARTS, the school of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker in Brussels, where he has worked on a new approach to teaching composition to young choreographers, within a framework of music practice but built also on his wealth of experience as a performer.

Artists of the 7 Dialogues:
IVO DIMCHEV
Ivo Dimchev, born in 1976, is a choreographer and performer from Bulgaria. His work is an extreme and colorful mixture of performance art, dance, theatre, music, drawings and photography. He has received numerous international awards for dance and theatre and has presented his work all over Europe, South and North America. In 2014, Ivo opened up his new place MOZEI in Sofia Bulgaria, an independent space focused on contemporary art and music.

TIM ETCHELLS
Tim Etchells is an artist and a writer based in the UK whose work shifts between performance, visual art and fiction. He has worked in a wide variety of contexts, notably as the leader of the world-renowned Sheffield-based performance group Forced Entertainment and is currently Professor of Performance at Lancaster University. In recent years he has exhibited widely in the context of visual arts, participating in international biennales in Italy, Sweden, Japan a. o. One of his recent publications is While You Are With Us Here Tonight (2013).

BETH GILL
Beth Gill is a dancer and choreographer who has been making contemporary dance and performance in New York City since 2005. She is a graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and has been a guest artist and teacher at several colleges, universities and festivals. Her per­formances have toured nationally and internationally. Gill is the recipient of a 2015 Doris Duke Impact Award, a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2015–2016 Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, and a 2012 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award. She is an inaugural member of The Hatchery Project, a 2015–2016 Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Extended Life Artist-in-Residence and a 2013–2015 New York City Center Choreography Fellow. In 2011 Gill was awarded two New York State Dance and Performance ‚Bessie’ Awards for Outstanding Emerging Choreographer and the Juried Award. In 2012, Dance Magazine named her one of the top 25 artists to watch.

ÉTIENNE GUILLOTEAU
The past couple of years, his choreographical work focused on the dramaturgical relation between dance, music and light. His main interest is to question the interaction of the various elements that compose theatre performance and representation. In November 2013 he premiered with his love duet Synopsis of a Battle at the Kaaitheater in the context of La Biennale of Charleroi Danses. He has created the solo Feu for Argentine dancer Cecilia Lisa Eliceche with live music played by electric guitar quartet Zwerm. In November 2015, upon request of the music festival DIALOGE in Salzburg, he has created a piece for eight dancers of the BODHI project from SEAD (Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance) in collaboration with the oenm (Öster­reichisches Ensemble für Neue Musik).

HETAIN PATEL
Hetain Patel is a visual artist. Since 2004, his video, photography, sculpture and live works have been shown internationally to critical and popular acclaim within institutions from Tate Britain, London to the Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art, Beijing. His works are in public and private collections in the U.K., China, India and U.S.A. In recent years, Patel has worked at the Royal Opera House, Tate Modern and Southbank Centre, London, and has shown work at the Venice Biennale. Patel is interested in connecting marginalised identities with the mainstream in an effort to destabilise notions of authenticity and promote personal freedom. Patel enjoys working across multiple languages, culturally and artistically. He is a New Wave Associate at Sadler’s Wells, London.

LUCY SUGGATE
Lucy Suggate is a dance artist based in the UK receiving recognition for her articulate and engaging solo performances. In 2013–14 Lucy became a Modul Dance Artist supported by Mercat de les flors and Graner in Barcelona, Dansehallerne/BoraBora in Denmark and the Arts council England Artist International development fund to produce a durational solo that went on to inform Lucy’s current work pilgrim. This work has been presented by international dance festivals. Recent collaborations include working with Rosemary Butcher on Secrets of the Open Sea,  Test Pieces for TANZ IM AU­GUST 2015, Wendy Houston’s Stupid Women, and on a two year EU project called Dancing Museums with Siobhan Davies Dance and the National Gallery London.

Raised in New York and initially trained in Florida with Nolan Dingman and Christa Long.

Forsythe danced with the Joffrey Ballet and later the Stuttgart Ballet, where he was appointed Resident Choreographer in 1976. In 1984, he began a 20-year tenure as director of the Ballet Frankfurt. After its closure, Forsythe established a new ensemble, The Forsythe Company, which he directed from 2005 to 2015. Forsythe’s most recent works were developed and performed exclusively by The Forsythe Company, while his earlier pieces are prominently featured in the repertoire of virtually every major ballet company in the world, including The Mariinsky Ballet, The New York City Ballet and The Paris Opera Ballet.

Further to his work as a choreographer, William Forsythe is a current Professor of Dance and Artistic Advisor for the Choreographic Institute at the University of Southern California Glorya Kaufman School of Dance.

Ersan Mondtag wurde 1987 in Berlin geboren und arbeitet zwischen den Feldern Theater und Musik, Performance und Installation. Er inszenierte u.a. am Thalia Theater in Hamburg, am Schauspiel Frankfurt, am Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin und an den Münchner Kammerspielen.

An der Otto Falckenberg Schule in München begann Mondtag 2011 zu studieren. Nach zwei Jahren brach er das Studium ab und gründete 2012 in München das KAPITÆL ZWEI KOLEKTIF, konzipierte im Kollektiv Dauerperformances, experimentelle Partyformen sowie interdisziplinäre Theaterarbeiten, zuletzt „Party #4 – NSU“ im Mixed Munich Arts (MMA). Für die Schaustelle der Pinakothek der Moderne realisierte er mit Olga Bach die neuntägige Dauerperformance „KONKORDIA“.

In der Spielzeit 2013/14 war Ersan Mondtag Mitglied im REGIEstudio des Schauspiel Frankfurt und inszenierte dort „2. Sinfonie“ (2014 bei radikal jung – Das Festival für junge Regie), „Das Schloss“ und „Orpheus#“ (2015 bei radikal jung – Das Festival für junge Regie). 2015 entstand sein Stück „TYRANNIS“, mit dem Ersan Mondtag zum Berliner Theatertreffen 2016 eingeladen wurde. Weitere Gastspiele, u.a. erneut bei radikal jung – Das Festival für junge Regie, folgten.

Das Fachmagazin Theater heute kürte Mondtag zum Nachwuchsregisseur des Jahres 2016. Gleichermaßen wurde er in den Kategorien Nachwuchsbühnenbildner des Jahres und Kostümbildner des Jahres ausgezeichnet. Seine Inszenierung „Die Vernichtung“ (Text: Olga Bach), die am Konzert Theater Bern produziert wurde, brachte Mondtag die zweite Theatertreffen-Einladung in Folge ein. 2017 kürte ihn Theater heute zum Kostümbildner des Jahres, die Deutschen Bühne wählte ihn zum Bühnenbildner des Jahres.

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 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