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While We Were Holding It Together by Ivana Müller | UNSTABLELANSCAPE Online Festival: Forever Hybrid

Posted by Marlon Barrios Solano on March 23, 2020 at 3:00pm

UNSTABLELANSCAPE Online Festival: Forever Hybrid Week 1
While We Were Holding It Together
by
Ivana Müller

In While We Were Holding It Together, a tribute to the power of the imagination, Ivana Müller subjects notions of body and mind, and the relationship between the two, to a closer inspection. This results in a poetic, humoristic and philosophical production that draws the audience into Müller’s clear logic. While We Were Holding It Together creates images in becoming, always changing, depending on who is looking. Is it a rock band on tour? A picnic in the forest? A hotel room in Bangkok? We look, imagine and re-invent while searching for what is hidden and for what we want to see.

Created in 2006, the piece has been shown more than 70 times in festivals and venues in Europe, the United States and Asia. In 2007, While We Were Holding It Together won two prizes at Impulse Festival (DE). The jury of this internationally renowned festival awarded the performance with the first prize for the best off-theater production as well as the prize of the Goethe Institute.

The piece was also nominated for the 2007 VSCD mime-prize, which is the annual prize of the collaboration of Dutch theaters and concert halls for the best show of the year in the category of physical theater.

The piece exists in the original English version and, since November 2008, also in a French version.

Concept, direction: Ivana Müller

Performance: Katja Dreyer/Sarah van Lamsweerde/ Albane Aubry, Pere Faura/Ricardo Santana/ Arnaud Cabias, Karen Røise Kielland/ Hester van Hasselt/Anne Lenglet, Stefan Rokebrand/Jobst Schnibbe/ Geert Vaes/ Sébastien Chatelier, Jefta van Dinther/Bill Aitchison/ Julien Fallée – Ferré

Text : Ivana Müller, Bill Aitchison, Katja Dreyer, Pere Faura, Karen Røise Kielland, Stefan Rokebrand, Jefta Dinther.
Artistic advice : Bill Aitchison
Sound design : Steve Heather
Light design & technics : Martin Kaffarnik

While We Were Holding It Together is produced by LISA and I’M’COMPANY, in co-production with Sophiensaele Berlin (DE), Productiehuis Rotterdam / Rotterdamse Schouwburg (NL), Dubbelspel (30CC and STUK Kunstencentrum Leuven, BE).

This project is financially supported by the Nederlands Fonds voor de Podiumkunsten and the Mondriaan Stichting.

This piece is presented on dance-tech.tv, .net by courtesy of Ivana Muller

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On dance-tech.tv | Claudia LaRocco Presents: Interview with Ivana Müller

Posted by Marlon Barrios Solano on June 28, 2011 at 11:30am
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Photo by Karijn Kakebeeke

Watch While We Were Holding it Together on dance-tech.tv
All about Ivana Müller on dance-tech.tv

I first encountered the Croatian-born choreographer Ivana Müller in 2006 in New York, during the Springdance Dialogue, an international gathering of dance artists organized as part of the Netherlands festival. A year later at the festival itself, in Utrecht, I saw her work “While We Were Holding It Together.” It made immediate sense, connecting that intense and humorous meditation with the strong, fiercely articulate and political individual I had met the year before.

Recently, Ivana and I reconnected—this time over Skype—to talk about “While We Were,” which was made in 2006, and can be seen here in its entirety.

Q: How do you feel about “While We Were Holding It Together” five years after having made it?

A: Just this weekend we have been performing the piece in Frankfurt, the original cast; there are four different casts that perform the piece. It’s a little bit like “Cats” the musical (laughs) …No I’m just joking But this brought a lot of interesting reflection about the piece in itself. The text is so specific but then so open at the same time, it can be read differently in terms of time and the place where it’s performed. For example, there was a sentence about Japan in the piece when we made in 2006, somebody says “I imagine we are Barbarella and The Bandits. We are now in Japan. Hello Tokyo!” And then there is the sound of emergency vehicle. Today it has very different repercussions.

And that’s actually the strong point in this piece. It has this direct connection to what’s happening in the world—it’s almost a matrix, a kind of machine that can produce reflection or imagination in different contexts. It works like this almost with every show: if you have 100 people in the audience they will make 100 slightly different versions in the show. They relate to it according to their own experiences.

 

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Interview with Jan Fabre: insects are the oldest computers

Posted by body pixel on June 20, 2009 at 4:30pm
Jan Fabre is an example of a renaissance man… it’s hard to catch all fields of contemporary art he had influenced over the last three decades…His performers are ‘true blue’ oriented towards ideas and processes he’s creating with them. It’s a mutual interaction above all, an interaction which creates new physical, emotional and mental spaces. The idea of kinetics or techniques makes no sense in his world, because his dancers are creating new laws of movements and physical comprehension. Sometimes, it even looks like Fabre is creating a glossary for understanding how the world is essentially built up.

Photo: originally uploaded by skipling (c)

Jan Fabre introduced his latest dance piece Another Sleepy Dusty Delta Day with remarkable Croatian performer Ivana Jozic at the World Theatre Festival in Zagreb. It’s created as a solo piece which was inspired by a classic and cult song from the sixties ‘Ode to Billy Joe’ by Bobby Gentry.As Theatre Troubleyn announces it with the following wordz: ‘Ode to Billy Joe tells the tale of a suicide. A teenage girl is having dinner with her family. Her mother announces that Billy Joe jumped off a bridge to his death. While the family members dish up memories of Billy Joe, discuss day-to-day worries and pass the food, the mother happens to notice that her daughter has lost her appetite. Gradually, and against this backdrop, curiosity about the untold part of the story gets the upper hand. What did the young teenage girl and Billy Joe throw off the bridge together? Were they secretly seeing one another?

Photo: Theatre Troubleyn (c)

A swelteringly hot, dusty kind of day. A story about loving and letting go, about jumping into the endless unknown.Jan Fabre opted to write “Another Sleepy Dusty Delta Day” in the form of a letter from a man to his beloved. The outcome is a truly personal text, which emphasizes the right to dispose of one’s own life, specifically the end of one’s life. A text that bears witness to empathy and respect for live, love and death.’

Mr. Fabre kindly gave me rather comprehensive interview on Sunday, fulfilled with his thoughts on arts… ideas… processes…Your two last dance pieces ‘Requiem für eine Metamorphose’ and ‘Another Sleepy Dusty Delta Day’ are dealing very directly with the issue of death? It is a kind of a brutal but poetic voyage based on your personal artistic and life journey? Death as real and surreal fact… What have you learned from the whole process?JF: As an artist: visual artist, writer and director being busy with this work that I’m doing, being busy with the beauty is always a preparation for saying goodbye; it’s always a preparation for dying. So, it’s an ongoing process I think…. You know, the reason I create is, because probably I do not understand well the outside world. Because I’m curios to understand the outside world, I’m researching and creating, asking questions and sometimes giving to myself answers.

Photo: JP Stoop (c)

You have an organic relation with artists you collaborate with… You have explained your technique in the book. There is no question that you always try to explore the edges of human physical endurance, but never only as a technique but as a specific theatre language? How did you achieve such devotion from your performers? They are vulnerable and strong at the same time…JF: It also came out over the thirty years that I’m busy. It’s worth to read ‘Corpus’, a book with my working methods and exercises. I’ve developed a kind of guiding line for actors and dancers through different exercises. So, let’s say it’s about the experience that I know what people have to go through, to reach something… what I call biological acting. It’s a combination of classical acting and the idea of what performers have to be; and this creates a kind of biological acting. It’s a research of knowing how your body works in different ways, particularly in a biological way: to know how the blood is pumping, how the heart is pumping, how the livers are reacting, how the kidneys are reacting. Because, sometimes we think it’s emotions, but it’s only about a chemical reactions. By being aware of these chemical reactions and by being an actor or dancer we can play with it.They interfere and it’s strange that people don’t except it as something logical…JF: Yes, it’s basically logical, but many people, maybe 99% of all people are not aware of this. They are not busy with it. (laughs)Unfortunately, yeah. (laughs)JF: They think that emotions are something from the outside world. No, emotions are happening inside of you, not outside of you.

Photo: andrefromont/fernardomort (cc)

Your fascination with insects was the initial drive for many of your sculptures and choreographies. I like your idea that insects are the oldest computers on the planet. Can you please tell me what lies behind the whole story?JF: I mean, look as for example a scarab beetle and look human beings: in the 40 thousand millions of years we have developed and changed a lot; and scarab beetles almost didn’t change. So, it means that they had a kind of intelligence long before us. They were, for example, first warriors; the first chemical warriors in the world were the scarab beetles. They contain an old knowledge that we have even lost in our development. So, that’s the reason why I call them the oldest computers, the oldest memory in the world. Don’t forget we are in that sense quite vulnerable; because we live in our inner skeleton and scarab beetles live in their outer skeleton. Scarab beetles survived a lot of catastrophes on the planet that we could not survive. I think animals are the best doctors and philosophers in the world. We still have to study them well to give ourselves again progress.The idea of the metamorphosis takes a significant place in your work… either your personal metamorphosis… performers’ metamorphosis … and the audience feels like being a part of an essentially changing process…JF: I hope so! Only what you can wish as an artist is that your work triggers ones mind, ones brain and by triggering the mind and brain a person or individual spectator changes. I mean, I hope that we artist, we can cure the wounds in the minds of the spectators. At the same time I hope I can do that. The spectator is sometimes like an animal, it is like an awaking its instincts, because through civilisation sometimes insects are very under control. Yes, as artist you hope that you can change people, you are looking their behaviour, their thinking, the way they feel their body. Yes, it’s a wish of me, yes! And I think it’s also an essentially strong wish of beauty.

Photo: Iguana Jo (cc)

The architecture of space plays an important role in your installations and theatre artworkz…JF: People usually miss use the terms theatrical and theatre today. Theatrical is the point where you look things from. Theatrical can be used in installation or the way you present your sculptures, because you make public to look from an uptill distance or uptill points. Of course, in my theatre, I’m very aware about the theatrical aspects on how the public looks at things, the lines of looking and the definition of space. And of course, I do the same as visual artist, in the same way I create an exhibition. There is always a kind of mizanscene that I’m making. This is the link, but they are at the same time two different things, two different mediums.They each have their own dramaturgy and narration…JF: Yes, of course.Your carrier started in the fields of visual arts and performance art. You had a successful collaboration with Marina Abramovic at Palais de Tokyo in Paris four years ago. Abramovic is a performer also known for pushing the social boundaries … what was the initial hint for your collaboration?JF: It was her wish to work with me for a long time, it was her dream to do with me a kind of a duo performance; and it took me a couple of years to say yes, because she is a very strong artist, very good artist and I respect her. It needed time; we had met regularly in different cities: Antwerp, Amsterdam, Rome… So, it took us several years to really develop it. And it was nice because when I was a young artist I was influenced by her work, what she did in her performances. Later she came to see my stage works and she said that I influenced her. So, it was beautiful in a sense because we belong to two different generations, two different backgrounds. Different cultural backgrounds. But at the same time we made something beautiful. Because, I think we are two virgin warriors who believe in beauty. We do not believe in destruction of art. We believe in the force of art and the vulnerability of art. I think we are two artists who like warriors are trying to defend art. So, that connects us, I think. That was a topic of the performance we did.

Photo: Gerard Rancinan (c)

You find drawings and dreams essential for the process of creating…JF: Yes! I’m working on different drawing projects for years. More then 25 years I’m putting my dreams on paper, but also for more then 25 years I’m making drawings from my blood. More then fifty years I’m making drawings of my own tears. I’m making drawings from my own sperm for more then ten years. So, it’s an ongoing research in drawing and research of human body.Read the rest of the interview on Personal Cyber Botanica: www.lomodeedee.com
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