The Centre Stage at the Attakkalari India Biennial continues to bring the global stage to the city’s performing arts venues. . The Ten days will see performances on the Centre Stage at venues across the city including Chowdiah Memorial Hall, Ranga Shankara, and Alliance Francaise de Bangalore.
(Single Ticket for Two Shows)
Described as one of the frontrunners of cutting edge dance-film and digital work, choreographer and multimedia artist Daniel Belton presents TRACES, a series of film collages in which the human form is used to investigate themes of mathematical scale, history and connections to topography. In these works, the body is the agent for inquiry; figures are removed from traditional, earthbound settings and juxtaposed on film using graphic design invoking the laws of physics and geometry. Dancers are dwarfed on screen, then brought back to full-bodied life, sometimes as fanciful characters. Through these mysterious journeys the artist illuminates the enduring cycles that connect and bind us. The works pay homage to the drawings and paintings of Bauhaus Master Paul Klee and the pioneering chronophotography of Étienne-Jules Marey.Read More
(Single Ticket for Two Shows)
For choreographer Tao Ye a single word or phrase is insufficient to encapsulate the meaning in a work of contemporary dance-theatre. He believes that titles can set preconceptions in the audience and limit creative direction. His numbered series of minimalist experimentations explore the potential of the human body as a visual element, freed from the limitations of representation or narrative.
Thus freed from the strictures of storytelling, these works can give free reign to the imagination and can inspire a plethora of interpretations. By titling his works with numerals instead of words, the choreographer hopes to transcend the duality of abstract versus concrete thought.
In 4, bodies seem to seek one another while being split apart by an unseen yet compelling force. In 5, a hidden force keeps the bodies together in an indistinguishable, kaleidoscopic mass.
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Visually striking and kinetically charged, The Measures Taken created in collaboration with digital media artists Marshmallow Laser Feast, explores our interdependent relationship with technology. With choreographer Alexander Whitley’s process rooted in the digital collaboration, the work is both a dialogue and a duet between human movement and the digital world. At its core are questions of the role of technology in society and the contrasting ways we come to view the world in a culture highly mediated by digital technology. In the process, the work explores the potential of technology to augment our self-image and change our understanding of what it means to be human. The Measures Taken was commissioned by The Studio Programme, The Royal Ballet and co-commissioned by South East Dance (UK).
LES CHANTS DES L’UMAÏ
FRANCE SUN FEB 87.30PM (SOLO/ 55 MINUTES) RANGA SHANKARA, JP NAGARIn the imaginary, dream-like state that the choreographer Marcia Barcellos creates in this work, she is Umaï, the womb of the universe, or a woman-dragon of the fictional territory of Gravbekistan. In this ode to femininity, the reconstructed memory of many fantasised or imaginary divinities is conveyed through five songs loosely derived from Indian or African melodies. Each of them, in the manner of ancient theatre, introduce an epic poem of a past era that only body memory can tie us to. As a loyal disciple of American choreographer Alwin Nikolais, the choreographer uses the whole gamut of effects, including video, lighting, holograms and props created by co-founder of Systeme Castafiore Karl Biscuit. The intersection of a movement vocabulary particular to her work and the ever-evolving scenography of Les Chants Des L’Umaï allows it to go as close as it can to a reimagined world. Read More
The Past, choreographed by Constanza Macras, explores the art of memory, or ars memoriae, in which memories are, in particular, strongly associated with physical locations, rooms and architecture. The starting point is the city as a concrete geographical location as an anchor for memory, a mental picture and a frame of mind. What happens with our memories, what happens to those who are remembering while these physical places are destroyed? The choreographer talked to eyewitnesses who remember cities that no longer exist in the same form today. The actions in the piece refer to the ancient techniques of ars memoriae, whereby in order to recall the thing to be remembered, we first have to find and organise our impressions. At the heart of this mnemonic technique is spatial orientation: how do we use rooms and places to remember?
The piece is the result of a close collaboration with Swiss/ Italian composer Oscar Bianchi Read More
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PATTERN & VARIABLE
KOREA TUE FEB 107.30PM (ENSEMBLE/ 55 MINUTES)Ranga Shankara, JP Nagar
Pattern & Variable, inspired by the martial art of Judo, is choreographed by Park Soon-Ho, who views sport as a way to control, mediate, traverse and indeed transcend the violent, churning urges within us. Using this idea, Pattern & Variable deploys the symbolic meaning of sports as a counterpoint and frame of reference and presents through the medium of dance, the harmonious play between rhythm, movement and space. Created for the Asia-Africa Dance Exchange Programme, the performance, which includes African and Asian dancers and a musician, melds Asian and African vocabularies to create a distinctive, energised landscape of tempo and movement.
Pattern & Variable was selected for the Performing Arts Market, Seoul, after its critically acclaimed premiere in Korea. It was then invited to UNAM in Mexico, Contemporary Dance Conference & other Performance Festivals Read More
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In 4: STILL LIFE choreographer Nicole Beutler distils elements from the long history of partner dance. Onstage are a woman and a man; their physicality and actions are guided by the principles of body geometry, and the architechture of space and light. All the elements of the work are interdependent and composed musically in space and time; leading or following, merging or interfering, distant or intimate. 4: STILL LIFE is a court dance, a mating dance, a play, a ‘Lichtspiel’, a ritual. Beutler drew inspiration from the early twentieth-century Bauhaus movement for this ‘mechanical ballet’ dance duet. She worked in close collaboration with the dancers,with light and space designer Minna Tiikkainen and composer Gary Shepherd, both of whose artistic visions have had a strong influence on her work for many years.
In choreographer Aditi Mangaldas’ words Timeless is not an answer, not a statement, not an opinion nor a single perspective. It poses many questions. It attempts to see, to feel, to experience, to hear and to touch this intagible, wonder-filled thing called time. Maybe one sees it as time related to space, maybe one hears it as an eternal flow, maybe one perceives it as completely still…maybe?
Is time reversible? Is time still? Is it cyclical and is it flexible? Does time end? These and many more questions about the nature of time are part of her investigations in this work. A dancer of the classical repertoire of Kathak, her inspiration for the piece come from various ruminations of time by thinkers like J Krishnamurti and poets such as Javed Akhtar. Infusing the vocabulary of Kathak with new and more contemporary sensibilities and idioms of movement, the work plays with the idea of time on many levels. Read More
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Cesc Gelabert’s last solo show Gelabert V.O. + is a combination of his first performance of three short solos and a reinterpretation of old pieces especially created for the AIB 2015. The work draws on the experiences gained by the choreographer in the last few years with several outreach programmes including Un día con el público (a day with the audience). The choreographer introduces different pieces with brief comments: references to his work, personal observations, the meaning of his choreographies or general ideas related to dance. With this piece, he finds himself returning to the heart and core of his creativity and the essence of his movement presence.
This performance, due to its intimate nature, is limited to a maximum audience capacity of 60 people
With materiality at the centre of the performance dancers leave traces of their movement on a floor strewn with black granules. Black Out, choreographed by Philippe Saire, is an elegy to our darker side and an appeal for self-contemplation. The proximity of an audience to this shape-shifting piece does not let a moment of change, however small, go unnoticed, making one ask - is this intimacy or is this voyeurism? The choreographer describes this work as being at the ‘crossroads of dance and visual art’. It carries both, a plentitude of movement and his fondness for drawing. Read More
*Parental guidance is advised
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7.30PM (ENSEMBLE/ 55 MINUTES)
RANGA SHANKARA, JP NAGAR
Exploring notions of masculinity using stereotypes, games, touch and relationships, a male ant has straight antennae plays out the polarities of masculinity in an arena-like preset. The work choreographed by Mandeep Raikhy and triggered by Rahul Roy’s Little Book on Men, challenges singular perspectives on the male body and its moorings while investigating the choreographer’s awareness, fear and attraction for the male form all together. Having begun by observing men on the streets, the work now finds itself addressing the ideas of masculinity that reside in the real moment of contact between people. Read More
*Parental guidance is advised
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