Lake Studios Berlin

Milla Koistinen graduated from the Theatre Academy of Helsinki, Finland with an MA in dance and from HZT Berlin with MA in choreography.  She has worked with Kristian Smeds, Hiroaki Umeda, Peter Verhelst (NTGent/Johan Simons), Cie Heddy Maalem, Christine Gaigg, Hans van den Broeck and Les Ballets du Grand Maghreb.  Since 2008 she has been creating her own work which have been performed at HAU, Tanzhaus NRW, Mad House Helsinki, Ballhaus Ost and Uferstudios Berlin. She has been a guest teacher at SEAD Salzburg, the Iceland Academy of the Arts, Tanzhaus NRW, HZT Berlin, and Sasha Waltz & Guests amongst others.

www.millakoistinen.net

Clara Furey danced for numerous choreographers, including Georges Stamos and Benoit Lachambre who strongly influenced her work, Clara Furey decided in 2003 to focus on choreographic creation and performance art. Her artistic concerns come into focus through a questioning of the notions of “savage” and “social” beings. Exploring the duality of solitary and community living, Clara choreographs and performs the role of the primeval human—inexhaustible, savage, wandering—whose survival instinct is perpetually active.  www.clarafurey.com

Peter Jasko was born in Slovakia. He took his first dance classes at the folk dance company Dumbier Slovakia. He then graduated  from the Conservatory J.L. Bella of Dance, Banska Bystrica, Slovakia. He continued his education at P.A.R.T.S. (2002). He danced for Zuzana Hajkova, Barberio Corsetti & Fatou Traore, and Company Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui. For 17 years, Peter collaborated as a performer and assistant to David Zambrano. Since 2002 Peter has taught in dance schools, international festivals, and  for professional companies. Peter is co-founder of Les SlovaKs Dance Collective. In 2014 he started his collaborative work with Clara Furey in Montreal.  www.peterjasko.org

Kareth Schaffer (1987, USA/NL) works as an independent choreographer and performer. Her choreographic work includes a piece about a story she won’t tell you (An Animal Went Out, 2016); an exhaustive examination of foley as a choreographic tool (Unheard Of, 2016); a multi-language danced manifesto (Letter to Dance, 2016); and a conceptual mudwrestling tournament with a dubious 100,000 views on Youtube (Dirty Money Mudwrestling, 2015). Schaffer regularly works with and for other artists such as deufert&plischke, Tino Sehgal, Stefanie Wenner, Christian Falsnaes, Roni Katz, and Alexandra Pirici.

www.karethschaffer.com

Julia B. Laperrière is a Berlin based choreographer and performer from Montreal. An honour’s graduate of the Dance BA at the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM), she has since her graduation presented her work in Montreal and internationally (Canada, France, Mexico and Germany). Julia also collaborates as a performer with artists such as Manon Oligny, Diego Agullo,  Alfredo Zinola, and Michael Müller, enthusiastically blurring boundaries between dance, theatre, performance, media and visual arts. Julia creates striking images of visual poetry, that she then embodies with generosity, aiming to confront, question and touch her audience. 

Ronnie Heller – Dancer, teacher & choreographer, born I the U.S.A, living and working in Tel Aviv Israel. Ronnie is a B. Dance graduate from the Jerusalem academy of music &; dance and a Former member of Clipa theater, working as an independent choreo-grapher and freelance dancer, founder and director of Ronnie Heller Dance-Theater. Ronnie is teaching body- theater, composition and repertoire of her work in the B. Dance program within the movement department at the Jerusalem Music and Dance academy in Jerusalem and studying there on scho-larship of excellence for her Masters degree in choreography.  www.ronnieheller.com

Stuart Meyers is a Berlin and NYC-based performing artist and creator. A graduate of Boston University, Stuart apprenticed Robert Wilson at The Watermill Center and worked with Christopher Williams, Thomas Bo Nilsson, Julian Webber, Colette Sadler and Tino Sehgal.  He created the solos “On The Rocks” in the US and “Witch Dance” in Berlin, along with the film “Tap Dancing in the Outfield” for “contes/xting SPORT,” a queer and feminist sports exhibition he co-curated in Berlin. Stuart’s currently working on a new solo funded by the Berlin Senat entitled “The Shabbos Queen,” a Shabbat dinner experience interwoven with personal and mythical storytelling about being queer and Jewish today. He is a certified hypnotist and is training in Kabbalistc dream work.

Arouna Guindo, was born in Ivory Coast in 1990. After many years of travelling within West Africa, since 2000 he is based in Cotonou, Benin. Since 2008 he works as a teacher and trainer in some of the main centres for dance and art in Benin and neighbouring countries (Institute Francais Cotonou, Centre Choreographique Multicorps and Lome-Togo). He used to be part of the “Kaletas” and “Djembe” crews and winner of the “hip-hop academy” (2010) and “talents d’Afrique” (2011) competitions. Apart from this, during the years he developed a career as a performer and choreographer and his works were presented on the main stages in Benin.

Tian Rotteveel studied music composition at the Royal Conservatoire of Holland and dance & choreography at HZT in Berlin. He has created 4 stage works which til date are active and touring. In his work Tian is committed to the practice of movement, sound and speech which he treats as interchangeable with each other . Sound and movement in his work are processes that can materialize into meaning, but as well into mere sensation.  He is currently developing a new solo work around the question “could music possibly be a surrogate of  language?”

Martin Nachbar works in the field of contemporary dance and performance. He tours internationally with his works, and he teaches regularly at places such as SNDO, HZT Berlin, TRINITIY LABAN, FU Berlin, University Hamburg, SEAD, and PARTS. Martin has published on his research in numerous magazines and publications worldwide.

www.martinnachbar.de

TAET VREMYA is an International artist movement collective uniting artists from different genres, styles, and ideologies. They advocate for the physical perception of life, and protest against outdated social practices, commonness, and contemporary pop-culture. They exist beyond the borders of time, but reflect its spirit, here and now.

On a Clear Day is the last piece of a performance series inspired by the artworks of Agnes Martin. It is a piece consisting of repetitive patterns, which replicate the mesmeric sense of infinity of her paintings. Martin pursued a remarkable, hypnotic, compulsive, musical repetition in her works, yet the paintings celebrate abstract glories of being: joy, beauty, innocence and happiness.

Concept, choreography and performance: Milla Koistinen

Music: Paul Valikoski

Light: Ladislav Zajac

Costume: Lee Méir

Production management and public relations: Jana Lüthje​

The performance, inspired by Louise Murphy’s The True Story of Hansel and Gretel: A Story about War and Survival, unfolds like a dark tale. Clara and Peter have co-created a seemingly simple yet multi-layered work. In a reversal of the usual power games, bodily forms are drawn to each other and then fall apart in this dark, phantasmagoric world. Restless and adrift, their senses at once scrambled and awakened, they create a shared sensuality that shelters them from outside forces. Infinite. Intractable. Nowhere.

Creation and choreography: Clara Furey & Peter Jasko
Dancers: Clara Furey, Peter Jasko
Composer: Tomas Furey
Light design: Alexandre Pilon-Guay
First artistic consultant: Catherine Gaudet
Artistic consultants: Benoît Lachambre et Francis Ducharme

Photo credit:  ©Mathieu Verreault – 2016

An Animal Came Back is a duet about a story we can’t tell you. We can dance it, sing it, mime it, swim it, but it’s about something one wouldn’t normally discuss on stage…This may sound a bit cryptic, but we’ll give you hints and enough time and dance for you to figure it out on your own–or even better, to just imagine a new and better story.

Concept and Choreography: Kareth Schaffer

Collaboration and performance: Leah Katz, Kareth Schaffer

Music: Christian Falsnaes, Kareth Schaffer

Costume: Chris Scherer

Lights: Cathy Walsh

JULIA B. LAPERRIÈRE :  unCOVERED woMAN​

Production : Julia B. Laperrière

Support : Dance Department of UQAM (Montreal), Délégation Générale du Québec à Berlin, Ada Studio,  Dance Matters (Toronto).

RONNIE HELLER :  surviving a dance moment​

Choreography: Ronnie Heller

Performance: Adam Shapira; Ronnie Heller

Sound track: Voice over from interview with Ulrike Meinhof 1976, edited voice over from the film Great Performances: Dance in America: beyond the mainstream 1980, original music by Aaron Cantor and David Heller.

STUART MEYERS : KOPFKINO

Choreography & Performance: Stuart Meyers

Dramaturgy: Hannah Hildreth

AROUNA GUINDO:  Toguna

​​Choreography and Performance: Arouna Guindo

In Propellor Tian proposes a synthesia-machine: exploring the kind of synesthesia where movement and sound are inseparable from each other –  creating a hybrid phenomena of its own kind.  The performer invites and touches the environment in order to pass it through the synesthesia machine. This process seduces its own odd logic, invites the capacity to dream, and lingers into a possible re-evaluation of what we know. We come to the point were one can wonder and can ask:  How do I treat what I know? And, how do I treat what I don’t know​?

Concept, Performance, Music : Tian Rotteveel

Outside eye :  Claire Vivianne Sobottke, Ulf Garritzmann

With kind support from: Bezirksamt Pankow von Berlin, Amt für Weiterbuldung und Kultur, Long Life Burning Europe, Zagreb Plataforma H, Tanzfabrik Berlin, Tanz im August 2013, Dock11 Berlin, and Uferstudios Berlin.

The father-son relationship is a constellation that has changed a lot during the last years due to changes of gender roles in job and family. Repeater tries to approach this constellation and to work with it, re-creating the bodily relation between my father and myself, and developing a laconic dialogue in movement. The question is if I, as a son, repeat the behavior of my father; presenting the possibility to do so and noticing the difference to the original. This performance also reverses the temporal principle: the father who imitates, learns and repeats the movement patterns and improvisation scores from the son. Thus, the mimesis of behavior becomes mutual and time as an ordered line of events is questioned.

Choreography: Martin Nachbar

Dance, Performance: Klaus Nachbar, Martin Nachbar

Artistic Collaboration: Jeroen Peeters

Scenography: Bettina Darmawan

Light: Bruno Pocheron

7 Sins

The performance is based on the 7 Christian mortal sins: gluttony, envy, greed, laziness, lust, anger, and pride. This classical theme is presented through a figurative, modern – associative approach. Together with the performer the audience will be pass through stages of all the 7 sins.

Creation/ Performance: Artem Kornilov

Bääattle!

Eight virtuosic dance artists from eclectic styles will meet each other in an experimental dance battle. Challenging each other, as well as the rules of the game itself, they will push the limits – improvising in extreme physicalities and mental states in order to build upon, destroy, or re-frame their opponents’ performances.

Staging: Kazuma Glen Motomura, Marcela Giesche, Artem Kornilov, Ivan Sakhnov

Performance: Ivan Sakhnov, Kazuma Glen Motomura, Artem Kornilov, and 5 invited guest dancers T.B.A.                  

Light: Emese Csornai

The workshop will focus on exercises and improvisational methods used in the creation of

“On A Clear Day” and Milla’s other works. The days will begin with physical exercises that are designed to evoke precision, clarity, lightness, energy, presence, and dynamics. During the workshop we will focus on: starting points for the work, sources of inspiration, translating ideas into physicality, defining, composing, and structuring material, and discussing interdisciplinary collaborations.

Dark Tales – Creative Lab

A dark tale can be as magical and poetic as it is sombre and upsetting. This starting point has brought up many questions on the notion of meeting: meeting the other, but also meeting the self and the past – including truths we don’t always desire to see.  We will study how in meeting, together or alone, our bodies tell a story: sometimes through abstract movements, sometimes through more figurative ones. We will also explore playing with the relationship between fiction and reality / truth and illusion.

As a result of the meeting of our two artistic universes, the workshop will mix elements from contemporary dance and performance.

Narrative and Dance

In contrast to 19th century ballet, much of modern dance has eschewed the idea of linear story-telling, preferring to relate to concepts, emotions, or physical states. This workshop re-examines the idea of narrative in relation to the moving body: how does dance tell a story, and how does story become a dance? In this workshop, we will dance, speak, write, pantomime, tell jokes, sing, move, and discuss this question in physical and theoretical explorations.

JULIA B. LAPERRIÈRE- Uncovering choreography:  How to turn images and inspiration into movement and choreography ? This workshop will recreate the path leading to the creation of the solo Uncovered Woman, using images (magazines, paintings, photos) and daily life as inspirations, and integrating work with objects on a visual, tactile, and metaphorical level. We will use automatic writing, tasks and improvisational scores to generate material, that we will then reshape and rediscover with the help of a partner. This workshop will not aim to recreate the original solo, but rather propose a frame and offer tools for each participant to go on their own creative journey.

RONNIE HELLER- Surviving Dance Moments: accidents are a part of our life. The outcome of these “out of our control moments”; is subject to our instinctive patterns. These acquired and inherited patterns will determine how we react in relation to gravity, space and time. Intentionally entering controlled accidents and gradually letting go of control can allow us to train and re-pattern our instincts, to react faster and with greater skill and therefore to take on greater risks with more security as we fly, fall and crash. The dancers foot is skilled and perfected to meet the floor softly and silently with great intensity and speed. It is my current fascination as choreographer and performer to try to achieve this with the body as a whole while meeting the floor and other bodies. Modified techniques from Martial Arts, Booth, early Contact Improvisation (fall after Newton), Gymnastics, Primal Practice; Feldenkrais and Improvisation shall be applied. Please come with long sleeved clothes for protection and bring knee and elbow pads if you need.

STUART MEYERS – SOD is an open, fertile space. It’s the ground onto which grass grows, the mystery space underneath layers of story, the abbreviation for “Sodomite”– one who constantly challenges, queers and f**** what we know. How can we allow for this SOD space, this vibratory underneathness, in making work?

In this workshop, we will make space for the SOD, first by warming into alternative states, activating ourselves, each other and the room. We will then create clear physical scores– silent, narrative scenes, and using cinematic techniques, such as jump cuts, rewinds, fast forwards, slow motion and replays, we will disrupt their flow. In doing so, we explore how to reveal the SOD– a queer, mysterious undertow, finding new ways to deepen our compositional work.

AROUNA GUINDO – The workshop I would like to have is based on the work “Toguna.” “Toguna,” is a contemporary experimentail hip- hop solo work, that deals with the conflict within ourselves and our outside enviroment.

“Top dance” and “floor rock” steps together with elements from the West Africans Hip-Hop style. The participants will practice basic steps of Afro Bit and Urban Dancemoves and incorporating them in improvisation sessions. By looking for their own story and their personal “I”, the participants will be encouraged to work with inner conflicts within themselves in relation to the others and the events around us. I hope to deal with the question of how to dance and be “cool” while staying aware of the movement, of myself and of my surroundings yet independent and open to freestyle?

We will be working together with African music.

The body of listening and the thingness of the voice

Relating to ways of creation and perception used in Tian’s work, this workshop explores different strategies and inquiries into listening and the use of voice. Via breath and voice work, rhythmic rituals, immersive states of listening, odd situations, talking and singing to our bodies, we make our way through what sound and voice can offer us. The voice is a place where body and mind meet, and the ears are always open – can’t close. Sound has the characteristic of being both material and immaterial. What can this awareness produce when  merely listening to an environment, to time, to materiality, to another person? What can be become precarious? What happens if we follow the odd logic of sound?

In this workshop, we will play with one of the approaches to movement we used in “Repeater”: Laban’s movement qualities. In a mix of improvisation and setting movements, we will mostly look at how to work with these qualities in order to develop a sense of laconically dialoguing in and through movement. What are the underlying and informative impulses, thoughts and emotions in this setting? How can they reverberate and influence the intensities and qualities of moving together? Where does it start and where does it end?

The first half of each day’s workshop will be based on Artem Kornilov’s personal view on experimental dance and how he perceives it to express the depths of the conscious and subconscious mind and body. He will focus on the major influences, techniques and ideas, which helped him to create a personal style and share the methods in which he found them.

The second half of the workshop will be led by Vanya (Ivan Sakhnov) and will go into the concepts and methods behind the group and the way they approach, and intervene styles of self expression in the underground dance culture scene. Creating , re-framing or destroying images, breaking down rules and boundaries, and surprising your partner/ opponent with the unexpected, are all tactics that will be explored in this physically and mentally challenging workshop.