There is an essential connection between the work of the Lebanese artist Rabih Mroué and the international dance ensemble DANCE ON: they both focus on memory, its truth and the media in which it appears or is embodied. Even though Mroué considers memory to be of a historic nature, the narrative manner of confronting social, national and class differences has a certain connection with the orders of human bodies that the DANCE ON Ensemble, a collective of dancers that the contemporary dance and ballet cultural market decided to retire unconditionally, and thus eliminate them from the field of vision, public sphere and memory.
At the beginning of the performance Elephant (2018), which premiered this year in the Berlin theatre HAU, the choreographer uses a series of sketches of anonymous corpses as a choreographic partiture or a sort of compositional frame. The choreography reveals itself as a crime story in which the choreographic catalogue of deductions appears on stage. With the audience’s imagination the empty stage is transformed into an urban war polygon, in which the dancers are training for various survival strategies. In this performance one of the basic questions is connected to space: where is the invisible choreographer hiding?
25 November 2018, 6pm at Španski borci
Followed by a presentation of the past and future of the Dance On Ensemble