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women meet regularly; to dance and to watch dance performances
together. What does that actually mean: meeting each other?
Encounters move us. We move each other. When do isolated movements
become a ‘movement’,
also in the political sense, when do randomly meeting people become a
group? And what holds them together – above all the trust in
commonalities, in what unites us? Or is it precisely what moves us in
the experience of differences?
The
Turkish-born choreographer Özlem Alkis, who lives and works in
Germany for 7 years, invited non-professional dancers from different
cultural and national backgrounds to rehearse an existing piece. It
gradually came into being as a space to get involved with each other
through dance, to negotiate things with each other, as a “tuning
in”. What holds us together? And how resilient or fleeting are
the common ‘rhythms’ that create a group, a community or a society
from a collection of individuals? How do we find our place among many
in the same space?”
“Reverbs_feiern” is for another reason more than the reenactment of “Reverbs”(2017) or an intercultural exchange project. Not only did the choreography enable the dancers to have new ways of experiencing the body – the encounter with them also changed Alkis’ choreography. The sometimes strong and collective, sometimes tender and personal, vibrating and breathy, connecting and disintegrating rhythms of “Reverbs – Celebrate”, which today open themselves to an audience, breathe, stomp, grope, swing differently than before.
