OPENING | Isabelle Schad (DE): Pieces and Elements
The Czech Republic finally gets to experience the choreography of the celebrated Isabelle Schad! Pieces and Elements, the opening performance of the 12th edition of the BAZAAR Festival, broaches the topic of human and non-human communities through a collective body in motion. A group of dancers creates an organism that can only exist as a whole. The body becomes a site for creating community, in which each element is an integral part of the collective being.
With its different parts and varied interconnections, this body serves as a possible reflection of nature, where each element relates to everything else – otherwise, the whole could not exist. The performance negotiates the shifting boundaries between scientific, biological and cellular approaches to the body, employing an approach that views the human body in relation to the cycle of nature and five elements: water, wood, fire, earth and metal. Pieces and Elements locates itself between western and eastern points of view, between visual and performance art, and between installation and choreographic miniatures.
After Collective Jumps, the first part of a trilogy on collective bodies, which explores the body as a site for creating community, Pieces and Elements considers phases of change and nature as potential energetic means of becoming one: as a body, a self, or a group.
In her 2016earlier work, Solo for Lea, Schad workeded with a single body as a portrait. In Pieces and Elements, she draws from this experience, focusing on the collective body as if on a Cubist landscape, which can be regarded as both a space of transformation and the event itself. What emerges is an oscillation between organism, apparatus and hybrid matter, between experience and sensuality, and between utopia and reality.
The performance contains nudity.
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Credits
CONCEPT AND CHOREOGRAPHY: Isabelle Schad
CO-CHOREOGRAPHY AND PERFORMANCE: Jozefien Beckers, Frederike Doffin, Johanna Ackva, Yen Lee, Manuel Lindner, Jan Lorys, Claudia Tomasi, Aya Toraiwa
SOUND: Damir Simunovic
LIGHT DESIGN AND TECHNICAL DIRECTION: Bruno Pocheron
PRODUCTION MANAGEMENT: Heiko Schramm Heiko Schramm
PRODUCTION: Isabelle Schad
CO-PRODUCTION: HAU Hebbel am Ufer
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Bio
The Berlin-based choreographer Isabelle Schad studied classical dance in Stuttgart and worked with numerous choreographers before starting to develop her own work in 1999. With over 60 works presented at festivals, museums and theatre spaces in Berlin and internationally, she has developed a distinctive practice at the intersection of dance, performance and visual art. Her research focuses on the relationships between bodies, choreography, (re)presentation, form and experience, viewing physical practice as a space for learning and community building. She teaches internationally and is a co-organiser of the Berlin workspace Tanzhalle Wiesenburg. Isabelle is a daily practitioner of Zen Shiatsu and Aikido. In 2019, she received the German Dance Award for outstanding achievements in contemporary dance. A connection to Isabelle Schad’s work and teaching is palpable in the work of Central European choreographers that will be familiar to Bazaar Festival spectators: e.g. Alica Minar (Lush Blast, in last year’s program), or Zuszsa Rozsavolgyi (Old Pond, presented at Bazaar Festival in 2021).
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Support
Funded by Hauptstadtkulturfonds and Regierender Bürgermeister Berlin – Senatskanzlei – Kulturelle Angelegenheiten. In Cooperation with Hochschulübergreifendes Zentrum Tanz Berlin (HZT). Supported by Wiesen55e.
Supported by the NATIONALES PERFORMANCE NETZ International Guest Performance Fund for Dance, which is funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.