2 December 2019, 19:00
Collegium Hungaricum Berlin, 10117 Berlin, Dorotheenstraße 12.
Climate crises, the faltering of democratic value systems and the emergence of radical ideologies can be identified as just a few of the defining matters of our time. The Internet has revolutionized the modalities of the creation, legitimization, redistribution and reception of knowledge. Today’s human being is interested in both local and global matters at the same time. As we struggle to absorb a flood of information, it is becoming increasingly difficult for us to select and prioritize what we are confronted with.
The final edition of the Klimata series – a one-year performance project by Montag Modus that explores global changes – provides an artistic response to our current mental state. How do we deal with fear? What are the coping strategies for the overload of information we experience in our daily lives and can shared presence or live art serve as an antidote to it?
Instead of offering direct solutions, Coping Strategies presents a variety of practices that invite you to immerse yourself in intimate, temporary communities.
Boglárka Börcsök: Figuring Age
performance & video installation
Figuring Age is a ghostly séance, an intimate and intimidating encounter hosted by Boglárka Börcsök. Come and visit Éva, Ágnes and Irén, three elderly Hungarian dancers who are all above 90 years old, in their apartment room on the 5th floor of the CHB. The ladies are waiting for you with tea and biscuits and are happy to meet you to share their stories, their secrets and to perform for you. In exchange, you will help them with everyday tasks, like getting out of bed, getting dressed, going to the toilet. You will exercise your empathy without pity and exorcise your fear of aging and death.
Boglárka Börcsök is a Hungarian artist and performer living in Berlin and Budapest. Currently she is working on a triptych in collaboration with filmmaker Andreas Bolm, exploring the biopolitics of the aged female body. The first project in the series The Art of Movement is a documentary film portraying three elderly female dancers. The second work is a solo performance called Figuring Age, devised for museums or site-specific locations. The last piece of the triptych, Second Skin, is intended for the theater. Second Skin is a taxidermic dissection of the aged body, a visceral performance oscillating between human figure and animal, inspired by the Dadaist legend Baroness Elsa Freytag von Loringhoven. In the past years, Boglárka has also worked in close collaboration with Hungarian choreographer Eszter Salamon. Their latest works are The Valeska Gert Museum and The Valeska Gert Monument within Salamon’s MONUMENT series. As a performer, she worked with Tino Sehgal, Kate McIntosh, Joachim Koester, Ligia Lewis and Kareth Schaffer amongst others. She studied dance at the Anton Bruckner Privatuniversität in Linz and at p.a.r.t.s. in Brussels.
Andreas Bolm is a filmmaker based in Hungary and Berlin. His works portray people in their social and familial environments, examining the fine line between documentary and fiction. His films have been screened at renowned festivals and venues worldwide, including Festival de Cannes, Berlinale, Rotterdam and in MOMA.
Performance
Concept, performance: Boglárka Börcsök
Artistic collaboration: Andreas Bolm
Video installation
Dancers: Éva E.Kovács, Irén Preisich, Ágnes Roboz
Direction: Boglárka Börcsök
Camera: Liza Rave
Editing & sound: Andreas Bolm
Production manager: Elisa Calosi
Lea Moro with Alexandra Hennig and Mona De Weerdt: Sketch of Togetherness – Related. Encounters as coping strategies
lecture performance, video, joint dinner
In times of almost completely digitalized life and work processes requiring constant flexibility and mobility, the real, purposeless and personal encounter has almost become an exception. To counteract this tendency, Lea Moro’s serial long-term project Sketch of Togetherness focuses on the physical encounter between two strangers. The starting point is the premise that the encounter with another person releases the potential to question familiar patterns of explanation, inscribed perspectives and one’s own lived reality. In the current world climate, in which previous certainties have become fragile, democratic value systems are under threat and ecological, social and societal catastrophes strike worldwide, Alexandra Hennig, Mona De Weerdt and Lea Moro ask whether and how encounters can serve as artistic and personal coping strategies.
For Montag Modus, they connect the Sketches realized so far in a video installation, live spoken text collages and a joint dinner.
Lea Moro is a choreographer, dancer, lecturer and cultural manager. She studied at the Accademia Teatro Dimitri, the LABAN Centre in London and at the HZT Berlin. Her solo works and group pieces tour internationally and are shown at renowned venues and festivals, such as Tanzhaus Zürich, ImPulsTanz Vienna and Tanz im August. Over the past two years, she has also been invited to teach at DOCH Stockholm, University of the Arts in Helsinki, HZT Berlin and Manufacture Lausanne.
Alexandra Hennig is a theatre and dance scholar, dramaturge and journalist. She writes about dance for the portal Tanzschreiber of Tanzbüro Berlin, for the Berliner Zeitung and the magazine tanzraumberlin. She is co-founder of the online portal Viereinhalb Sätze. Texte über Tanz and co-curator of the festival A.PART in ada Studio, Bühne für zeitgenössischen Tanz, Berlin.
Mona De Weerdt is a theatre and dance scholar and dramaturge. From 2012-2016, she was research assistant at the Institute for Theatre Studies at the University of Bern. Subsequently, she worked as a dramaturge and production manager at Südpol Luzern and since 2018, she has been working as a freelance dramaturge.
Michelle Ettlin is a freelance filmmaker and photographer. After studying art history and film sciences, she graduated from the Lucerne University of the Arts in 2008 with a degree in Visual Communication and Animation. She works as an editor and camerawoman for cinema and television productions and currently as a documentarist for musicians, theatre and dance productions, as well as making documentaries, experimental films and video works for theatres.
Andres Bucci studied cultural management at the Pontific Catholic University of Santiago de Chile and specialized in electronic music. His music was produced on labels such as Traum Schallplatten, Horizontal, Cynosure Recordings, Kupei Musika, WMF, Pier Bucci’s label Maruca or Hummingbord. He collaborates on the project Sketch of Togetherness as sound artist and technical support.
Sketch of Togetherness is a production by Lea Moro. Funded by Cultural Affairs City of Zurich, Kanton Zurich – Fachstelle Kultur, Pro Helvetia – Swiss Arts Council, Fondation Nestlé pour l´Art, Ernst Göhner Stiftung, Stiftung Anne Marie Schindler, Schweizerische Interpretenstiftung, Georges & Jenny Bloch Stiftung. Co-produced with Tanzhaus Zürich, CDCN Uzès Gard Occitanie – les Vins du Duché, *ALTEFABRIK / Gebert Foundation for Culture Rapperswil-Jona, far° festival des arts vivants Nyon. Supported by residencies Centro NAVE Santiago de Chile, Fundación Mar Adentro Chile, Morishita Studio/The Saison Foundation Tokio, KLAP Maison pour la Danse Marseille, Espace Darja Casablanca.
Henry Wilde (aka Antonia Baehr) & Neo Hülcker (aka Prof Puppy): Tentaculus Ohri
performance
Tentaculus Ohri is a concert for one listener and two performers. Henry Wilde and Neo Hülcker will present their collection of animals of an “other nature” to you. You will wear a hearing apparatus that Hülcker and Wilde built for focused listening and you will listen to animal sounds from their archive. It will be very silent and you will learn how to listen like a blättrige Langschwanzanglerin. People will watch you and you will be a little owl. It is completely unplugged and somewhat bricolage: an assemblage of cardboard, hand-held miniature speakers and cheap objects will be played by the performers’ four hands. A small audience can watch.
Neo Hülcker (alias Thousand Tingles) and Henry Wilde (alias choreographer Antonia Baehr) have been working extensively together since 2016. Their pieces appear in various visual and acoustic formats such as sound composition, video work, performance and installation. They focus on techniques and themes such as ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian reaction), ecosex, animal-human relationships and childhood. Their collaborative productions include: Concerts for Breaking of the Voice by Neo Hülcker (2018), the series Music for Dead Animals (since 2017), the installation Da war ich noch nie in meinem ganzen Leben (2017) and the two-on-one performance Tentaculus Ohri (2018).
Janine Eisenächer: Ecologies of Listening: Environmental Entanglements
durational performace
In this durational performance and installation, Janine Eisenächer investigates the practice of listening – to herself, to the things that surround her, to the Earth and to the world – as a mode of “inter-are” (S. Voegelin) and “being-with”(D. Haraway) the world and, consequently, as a method of dealing with the challenges connected to climate change. Wandering between her personally felt mental climates of rage, hope and sadness, she engages in real encounters with the things that are present in the space, paying attention to their specific material qualities, stories, and resistances. Eisenächer explores the possibilities and conditions of co-existence and co-creation by playfully creating acoustic “string figures” (D. Haraway) in a care-taking, sometimes conflicting manner. These entanglements, which make every process in life a form of co-mmunication, co-llaboration and co-mmunity, are part of us, of how we relate, of our movements and (inter-)actions, of our perceptions and experiences, of our bodies and minds, and of our world(s).
Janine Eisenächer is a Berlin-based performance and sound artist, curator, writer and researcher. In her object- and material-based lecture and sound performances, she discusses the subjects of work/ labour, collaboration and ecology from different perspectives and herein investigates Performance Art as a political and transformative practice of playful experimentation, critical thinking and entangled co-existence. Eisenächer holds a Magistra Artium degree in Theatre Studies and Comparative Literature (Freie Universität Berlin). Both in her artistic and theoretical work, she currently focuses on sonic actions with things, particularly on the action-related and material-based sonic know-how(s), and auditory knowledge(s) and memories performed and embodied in sound performances across the disciplines.
Imre Vass: hands-on
Performance
hands-on is an experiment to connect to the bodily in the age of the digital
hands-on is a way of surfing on the information superhighway, while being in touch with the energy pathways of the body at the same time
hands-on links the outer with the inner, the micro with the macro, AS above as below
hands-on is about continuous information sharing
hands-on is to “feel out” a problem on a tentacular level
In the age of interconnectedness, there is a tendency to solve our issues on our own, to DIY fix our problems, to google- and youtube-educate ourselves. Instead of contacting a real person first, we do our own research. With the piece “hands-on”, Imre Vass experiments with a bodily approach to knowledge consummation and creates a space where high-speed information can be shared in a soft, caring and comfortable environment.
Imre Vass is a Budapest-based dancer, performer and choreographer. After graduating from the Budapest Comprehensive Dance School in 2007, he worked with Hungarian companies HODWORKS, The Symptoms, STEREO Akt and outside of Hungary with Ultima Vez [BE], United Sorry [A\NL], Ingri Fiksdal [NO]. Since 2010, he has been producing his own solo, duo and group pieces, investigating the role of the spectator and the relationship between the audience and the performers. His choreographic works include “taking place” (2015) and “Standing Ground” (2017). He has collaborated with Dávid Somló (interdisciplinary artist, composer) on the pieces “it comes it goes” (2013), “Iitthhoonn” (2018) and “Drohnentanz” (2019). He is a member of the DEEPER F Collective (along with Márcio K. Canabarro, Csaba Molnár and Tamara Zsófia Vadas) whose first work, “Deeper” (2018) took the form of a stage piece, a gallery work and an outdoors performance. In 2018, he joined iCoDaCo (International Contemporary Dance Collective) with five other choreographers and created the piece “it will come later” (2018).