MINDS

Experimental Theatre Club in New York Experimental Theatre Club in New York

In an interview with Romm Lewkowicz, Ariel Ashbel talks about the genesis of “Fiddler!

A text by Thomas Ryckewaert

After working with this project, it is tempting to draw a parallel to Egil Haga’s (1999) Master’s thesis about sounds and actions. Using the term synchronicity he refers to the concept when a physical action and a sound gesture is believed to be generated from the same action. He points out that most films contain soundtracks generated in studios, and he is critical of examples where the synchronicity is imprecise and poor. Further, he mentions the fact that cross-modal perception results in greater stimuli. For example, it is easier to understand a person talking if you can see the lip movement. Ellen Stewart Theatre’s upstage double doors open into a distant room, revealed only when they are flung open to haul a performer in or toss them out.

One dancer holds a melting ice cream of bright green in her hand, creating an image of cold, unnatural exposure. For two years, the two artists travelled in a motorhome through the North of Norway, where they visited the cities of Tromsø, Alta, Kautokeino, Storekorsnes, Kirkenes, Storskog and Tana Bru. In those places, they performed in private homes, asking for a meal or a coffee in exchange.

Premiered in 2005, the solo marked the beginning of Mia MiaHabib.com Habib’s career and has been the subject of several lectures and publications. The leading role in couple is often exchanged; the longing for the two women (or the two men) to dance with each other is often disrupted by the urge of an excluded dancer to bring them back to the original couples. Mastering a specific technique for turning, each dancer competes to be the fastest, to find new virtuosities, to catch the attention of another partner, to be noisy and bold, rewriting the rules of what seems to be a courtship in times of fluidity. All these have become parts of a choreography from the end of the world that slowly yet inexorably tightens its grip.

Mia Habib is a Norwegian dancer, performer and choreographer based in Oslo. In choreography and dance pedagogy from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts. An overriding goal for her work is to investigate the agency of choreography in social, political and artistic spaces; to ask how a choreographic project can blur these different spaces, interact with them, and create new spatial ecologies. She further seeks to transform the research process into an ‘open practice,’ exploring interdiciplinary approaches to sites, places, and various conceptions of publicness. Its striking opening image – Geir Hytten and Jakob Ingram-Dodd, silently wandering around the black box stage with transparent nylon backpacks full of grass and soil – is both dystopian and poetic. The only noise is the sound of water in the rubber boots one of them wears; the only object, an oversized black pillow – a Chekhov’s gun that will fire at the end of the piece.

We don’t have to wonder what would happen if Davis’ voice is silenced — we already know. Editing the music into artificial loops and splices and then searching for meaningful ensemble composition is akin to knocking down walls and then looking at the rubble to determine the size of the building. But the sun came up is equally enigmatic, but it deals in layers of color, texture, and objects, rather than simplicity.

The performance with and by dancer and choreographer Mia Habib premiered at Regional Arena for Samtidsdans / Sandnes Kulturhus 22 April, and had its pre-premiere at Black Box Theatre April. Mia Habib was in 2009 the chosen artist of the year by Dance House in Oslo presenting three projects in the house. Habib has a special ability to engage and activate people, especially in situations of intimacy and/or vulnerability, and to incorporate them into her practice.

Mia Habib (choreographer, CSC)

Through its wide range of events, the project explores several ways in which artistic presence can be manifested, traveling not only within physical territories, but also in time. The events that bring the works from the road into the art institution do not feel like a show at the arrival station, but rather invite the spectator to embark in a multidimensional moving vessel. The project is a wide co-production between TrAP- Transcultural Art Productions, Black Box Teater, IKM/Oslo Museum, Teaterhuset Avantgarden, BIT Teatergarasjen and Mia Habib Productions. Stranger Within heads thereafter to Oktoberdans in Bergen and SITE in Stockholm. While developing the project HEAD(S), Mia implemented the pre-project MIND(S) in Tel Aviv in February 2012 – a research and dance series of three meetings in Shop31 Gallery.

A relation in an in-between space where shadows in the dark sing about our masks and plays, where abstract forms, animalistic dialogues and the sensual play between two bodies become one. A PhD fellow at the University of Agder (NO), Nunes works as a performer, dramaturge and writer. In the playfulness of breathtaking dance, the game of love is painful and relieving, freeing or imprisoning. Just as with couples dancing in jackets with a shared sleeve, it all depends on how one can embrace the struggle and transform it into a creative act.

Through the doors, the audience glimpses people in struggle, or celebration, though it’s unclear whether anyone wants to be in there. Later, a performer stabs through the eyes of his mask, a fragile paper river divides the stage in half, and another dancer jerks his body like a marionette. Considering the antics taking place onstage, an endless party, or even an endless battle, might be preferable.

After growing accustomed to the running pattern, the eye searches for more subtle relationships among the performers. Unfortunately, their internal gaze cuts them off from one another, despite their physical proximity. As part of the festival “The Present Is Not Enough – Performing Queer Histories and Futures”, HAU initiated an open call for artists based in Berlin, who were invited to submit proposals for their Manifestos for Queer Futures. Ali Chahrour will present his dance performance “Iza Hawa” as part of the festival “Love is a Verb”. A conversation with HAU curator Petra Poelzl about politics, grief and love. Luckily, the Mac did not crash and the sound turned on and off as it should, every day.

The way the objects, the room and the performers are available to the spectator before and after the performance erases the lines that separate layers in the event. Unlike most objects exhibited at museums, the installation at IKM can be touched, moved, changed. The artists are there not only as artists, but as complex subjects, in connection with their environment beyond the institutional context.