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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

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.

Read complete interview