How close does something need to happen for me to feel it, to sense a connection or a responsibility?
While Taking Shape was born from this question, from the growing feeling of detachment in a world where terrible events are constantly displayed before our eyes through the media: An endless flood of images, at high speed and stripped of any context, that seems to freeze our ability to feel, turning proximity into a kind of numbness.
I know it’s happening, but who is it happening to?
– Kae Tempest
The research for While Taking Shape began from the desire to dive deeper into questions of connection and responsibility, from the need of insisting on the question of what it means to bear witness.
Choreographer Amparo Gonzalez Sola approaches these concerns by bringing our attention to small gestures. She invites us to observe gestures as portals or possible connectors. Together with the performers she explores ways of tracing the memories gestures carry by embodying them, slowing them down, pausing, and reshaping them: What pasts and futures are hidden on them? In which way a gesture held in one body is connected to other gestures, held by other bodies?
The work is invested in the multiple relationships between gaze, distance and proximity, and the roles they play within spaces of witnessing. During the performance audiences and performers share the space, with no fixed distances and visible to each other.
Credits
Performance and research | Rita Bifulco, Amador Alina Folini, Leandro de Souza, Amparo González Sola. |
Sound design | Nahuel Cano |
Light design | Vinny Jones |
Dramaturgy | Bek Berger |
Production | Sanne Jacobs – Dansateliers |
Concept and direction | Amparo González Sola |
Coproduction | Dansateliers, Spring Performing Arts Festival, Frascati Producties |
Support | BAU AIR (NL), Greenhouse (NL), ROOMS Festival (NL), workspacebrussels (BE), Tanzhaus Zürich (CH), CAMPUS Paulo Cunha e Silva (PT). |