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Dancing Tongues: Voices and Choreographies

The Research Lab Dancing Tongues: Voices and Choreographies is a two-day practical exploration of landscapes of voice and the feminist approach to contemporary choreography. It is organised as part of Claire Viviane Sobotke's Visiting Professorship at the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies in collaboration with Bojana Kunst's Sonorous Bodies seminar. For this practical research laboratory, we have invited guests to join us in exploring the potential of the voice and its relationship to dance and choreography. Over two days we will explore different methods and approaches to voicing and dancing the body, the relationship between voice and politics, working between practical exploration and theoretical reflection on methods, tensions, dynamics, explosions, organisations and disruptions of the voice. We are particularly interested in the feminist, queer potentiality of the voice in choreography that plays with the normative orders of the sounding body and disrupts the semiotic links between voice and language with the wet and soft materiality of a dancing tongue.


Schedule:


Friday 31 January 2025:

14.00 - 15.00 Warm-up Claire Vivianne Sobottke
15.00 - 19.00 Laboratory Antonia Baehr
19.00 - 20.00 Talk Bojana Kunst (moderator)


Saturday 1 February 2025:
10.00 - 12.00 Jule Flierl
12.00 - 13.00 Break
13.00 - 15.00 Jule Flierl
15.00. - 16.00 Talk Bojana Kunst (moderator)
16.00 - 17.00 Closing Claire Viviane Sobottke


There are some places still free.


If you have an interest to participate, please send the email to Julie.Pownall, we will confirm your participation untill 20th of January.


Venue:
Theaterlabor, Institute for Applied Theatre Studies Giessen, JLU Giessen
Bismarckstraße 24A 35390 Gießen


Participants:


Antonia Baehr is a choreographer, performer, filmmaker and visual artist. Her works explore the fiction of the everyday and of the theatre, among other themes. She works together with various partners, frequently in the form of switching roles: from project to project, each artist alternately takes on the role of either guest or host. Baehr studied film and media arts at the Hochschule der Künste, Berlin, with Valie Export (1996) and obtained a DAAD-grant and a Merit Scholarship for the School of The Art Institute of Chicago. There she completed her Master in Performance with Lin Hixson. Since 2006, she has taught as guest professor at several European colleges. She has taken part in diverse group exhibitions (re.act.feminism, Center for Contemporary Arts Estonia Tallinn, Museo de Arte do Rio, MACBA Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, et al.); in 2012 the Neue Kunstverein Gießen showed her work in a solo exhibition. From 2006 to 2008 Antonia Baehr was associate artist at the Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers. From March to May 2013, The Beursschouwburg, Brussels, presented a programme comprising performances and films as well as an exhibition: “make up: at Antonia Baehr and Werner Hirsch’s table”. The works shown included those of artists who have worked over many years in various roles together with Hirsch and Baehr, as well as numerous works by Hirsch und Baehr themselves.

 

Jule Flierl is an artist from Berlin/Germany who works with choreography and the voice. Using choreography and somatic singing methods, her scores unsettle the relationship between seeing and hearing: what you see is not always what you hear, and what you hear is not always what you see. She revives and continues the legacy of Valeska Gert, avant-garde dancer from 1920's Berlin, who first conceptualized the genre Tontanz: to dance with one's voice. Jule is fascinated how conceptions of the body change over time and that the voice as a technology of the self always finds new relations to the body. She asks herself how the baroque Bel-Canto voice would inhabit the gestures of romantic ballet (Operation Orpheus 2016), how the antipropaganda of Valeska Gert’s dancing tones in the Weimar Republic would have sounded (Störlaut 2018) and how to choreograph the separation of body image and vocal sound of Katalin Ladik’s avant-garde performances during the Cold War (U.F.O. 2021). Flierl collaborates with choreographer Antonia Baehr “Die Hörposaune” live / film (2022) and ToneDance artist Irena Z. Tomažin “U.F.O. - Hommage to Katalin Ladik” (2021). Her group choreographies “School of Attunement and Tactlessness”(2022) and “Time out of Joint”(2023) develop grotesk bodies and dissonant collectives. Her work was featured at Impulstanz Vienna 2021/2018/2016, Tanzplattform Munich 2020, Steirischer Herbst Graz 2019, NEXT Valencienne 2018, Legs/La Raffinerie Brussels 2018 and Rencontres Chorégraphiques Paris 2018, La Panacée Montpellier 2016, Tanztage Berlin 2016 amongst others. As a dancer she worked with Meg Stuart, Tino Sehgal, Martin Nachbar, Gintersdorfer/Klassen, Sergiu Matis and Anna Nowicka a.o. 2015 she received the DanceWeb Scholarship for Impulstanz/Vienna. In 2016 she was introduced as “newcomer” and in 2018 she was nominated as “hope for dance” in the German “Tanz” Magazin. In 2019 she received the award for best choreography at the Solo Choreografico Festival Frankfurt am Main for “Dissociation Study”. 2021-2024 Jule is part of the APAP Network. Jule graduated from SEAD-Salzburg academy for contemporary dance, holds an MA in choreography at EXERCE Montpellier and is a certified teacher of the somatic voice method “Lichtenberger Methode”. She initiated and co-hosts the voice performance series FROM BREATH TO MATTER in Berlin since 2017 and co-published a Podcast of interviews with artists who interweave voice and choreography as continuation of the live event series in 2021.


Claire Vivianne Sobottke
Claire grew up in a french german family and is currently based in Berlin, where she
engages in the practice of choreography, performance and dance. Originally trained as an actor she quickly moved into the work with the body, dance and extended body - based practices. She defines her work as place of resistance and undoing, where norms of thinking about bodies can be challenged or changed. In her choreographic practice she thinks about the body as turbulent accumulation of concepts, collective and personal histories, traumata, memories, projections, identities and magic. Dancing thus becomes a way to activate the bodies archive, to make visible its inherent turbulence. The voice acts herein as a driving force. Claire understands the voice as political tool and poetic phenomenon and explores it in different states of speaking and singing. She installs her work both in the context of theatre and museum. Her choreographic works include a.o. “à mort – A Choreographic Song Cycle For Three Voices “ (2023 Sophiensaele Berlin ), “Velvet“ (2019 Tanz im August and the museum version which premiered at Gropius Bau Berlin 2020) and her first solowork “strange songs” (2016 Sophiensaele) for which she was awarded Hoffnungsträgerin Tanz and won the audience award of the 8tension Series at Impulstanz Festival,Vienna. Claire often works in collaborative constellations with shared authorship. In collaboration with Fabrice Mazliah and Marialena Marouda she created „FULL BODY FRONTAL“ (2022 Mousonturm Frankfurt), together with Michael Turinsky and Teresa Vittucci „WE BODIES“ (2019 Tanzhaus Zürich). Claire understands choreography not only as the production of works for the stage but also as the practice of creating spaces for encounters. Her curatorial work includes „SOFTSCORES“ (2021 Pact Zollverein, Essen), "Songs for Love and Rage" (2018 Tanznacht Berlin) and "Amazonas" (2017 Sophiensaele Berlin) She sees the practice of curation as a way to gather communities around contemporary social turbulence, political speculations and concerns. Since 2015 she works closely with Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods. She was part of the projects “Until our hearts stop” (2015), “Celestial Sorrow” (2018) and “Solos and Duets” (2019), as well as the improvisation formats “City Lights” (2016), “The Matter Lab” (2022) and “Reflex” (2023). From 2020 till 2021 her artistic research was supported with a fellowship by Pact Zollverein. In 2022-2023 she received the Tanzpraxis fellowship by the city of Berlin Claire teaches at HZT Berlin, Uniarts Helsinki, ImPulsTanz Vienna, ZZT Köln, Campus Gegenwart Stuttgart, ZhdK Zürich, HfMDK Frankfurt, ERG Brussels a.o. She develops sustainable performative strategies to subvert objectification, patriarchal hierarchy and abuse through a playful sexuality, sensuality, ecology and collectivity. Herein the exploration of pleasure, eroticism and exorcism are tools for the re - appropriation of the body as self - defined territory.

 

Bojana Kunst is a philosopher, dramaturge and performance theorist. She is a professor at the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies at the Justus Liebig University in Giessen. She was a researcher at the University of Ljubljana and a guest researcher at the University of Antwerp (2002). She was a DAAD guest professor at the University of Hamburg (2009 - 2012). Her research interests are contemporary performance and dance, art theory, political theory and philosophy of contemporary art. She is in the international editorial board of Performance Research and Maska. Her latest books are Artist at Work, Proximity of Art and Capitalism, Zero Books, London, 2015 (in Slovenian, English, Polish and Danish) and The Life of Art. Transversal Lines of Care, Ljubljana, 2021 (in Slovenian and German 2023).