Winner Jury Prize HAU - 100° Berlin

Concept, choreography, performance: Barbara Berti

Where do we come from?  From a hidden energy that is so close to our reality, but doesn’t belong to our dimension? It’s not just spirituality, it is so concrete sometimes that all the physical world disappears and I enter the microcosm, and float towards the sky.

Working with visible and invisible things. At first there was a point, flowing without decisions. Then someone called it ‘shape’ and a separation occurred. Infinite numbers. I started to fly, but I was visible, too visible. Confusion. I fail. Many identities at the same time. Silence — the space above me. Tilting my head up 2cm, my focus blurred. I am not attached to any material things, I think. Then it all becomes an explosion. The point is, how long? Almost here. Towards the stars again. Emphasizing one point and all the possible volumes accessible from my body-mind. Glitter on my shape. Still not here.

I am a shape, in a shape doing a shape

We are two, sometime we become three, or many, sometimes we become the public, or even one feeling, or a plant, the tree in winter under the snow, in this space full of things, crowded and fat in a communication system, constantly flowing through the present and the past that we experienced and are still experiencing. Focus on the immediate situation and the physical relationships that are present. The concept of kinesthetic empathy is central in this piece. I work with improvisation to animate a subtle interaction between the dancers' bodies and audience, always open to shifts and changes in any moment, or how time determines the moment.  The mind and the body look for feelings and stretch themselves around their own and public wishes, as well by their effects, thought the past that we lived together. 


Aoouuu

Barbara Berti, together with Marco Mazzoni and Kareth Schaffer, begins the creation process with an audition for dogs. The performance brings the human animal and the non-human animal together in a safe environment that contemplates different perceptions. Ideas of fun, play and fighting induce participants to navigate instantaneous and interactive choreographic flows. The performers map and structure the space both through intimate acts of presence and the positioning of objects; blurring the boundary between animate and inanimate and continuously deconstructing the ‘situation’. The Situation draws on Donna Haraway’s suggestion to rethink the relationship between species and to “be able to join another, to see together without pretending to be another”. It assumes the unpredictable and insecure threshold in which the continuous construction and destruction of a place are both relational and empathetic. Within it, physicality is a radar, a language to communicate spatially. An expression of the territory and not of identity. 

A ritual to connect people beyond cultural, social, or language boundaries; a space of inclusion of all the possible beings, within the lack of social structures. Belonging to a pack, belonging to their own being, belonging to the beings.



The situation. DOGOD

My studio is a look to the our daily actions, that influencing the environment and create suffering.  With the focus in what we eat and buy every day. Questions between behaviors, responsabilities and fun.

The topic is very real, yet seems so absurd that it is almost unreal. It also seems unreal that so many people are either blind or choose to look away, some out of sheer laziness, as if the issues were not real to them. I meet the audience in the real world. The difference between real and unreal seemed striking and I chose to amplify that aspect.

MYSPACE – Experiment

What’s happen when we meet, interact or interface?
Do we not classify most events on stage, and in life, into certain categories?
What happens if we don’t categorize right away; if we don’t immediately use our background and knowledge to understand what we see and hear?
If we simply let the impressions work on us.

In this work some aspects of the theme ‘categorization’ are investigated and how it influences the way we interact with and participate in life.
Part of the research is about understand  when movements begin to have meaning or when they are abstract.

It is told through physical performance with auditory sensitivity also playing a key role in the overall positioning of the audience. The sound is used to show how sensitivities to subtle and how in our environment can alter perception and presence.

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Barbara Berti