Spectatorship

Premiere 5th November in Lantaren/Venster, Rotterdam - click blog for more information

In his new performance Spectatorship, the strong willed choreographer Bruno Listopad continues his explorations of the possibilities and limits of the medium dance and performance art. Together with his dancers, he explores the position of the spectator in relation to the performer, in which he questions the inequality between the two. The performers in Spectatorship indulge their darker sensibilities. They affirm what is captured in their person, and use that to create the appearance of something “new” through a process of alienation. And in the end it is up to the audience to decide whether the inequality between spectator and performer is real.

Concept: Bruno Listopad / Made by: Bruno Listopad together with the performers / Performers: Angelina Deck, Aleksandra Maciejewska, Kay Patru, Amaranta Velarde González / Resident artist: Eric Schrijver / Music by: Dirk Haubrich, the performers and others / Set design: Edwin Kolpa & Bruno Listopad /Costume design: Edith Ordelman & Bruno Listopad / Light design: Albert Tulling & Bruno Listopad / Photo: Bruno Listopad / Special thanks to DANSLAB for giving the possibility to research for this performance / Spectatorship is a co production of Korzo producties and Stichting Disjointed Arts

Monochrome - performance /installation at Tuin der Lusten

Saturday, 19th (6pm) of September at the DCR / Den Hague (Danslab)

Monochrome will celebrate inadaptability to an environment and explore difference within the sameness.

Concept: Bruno Listopad / Performers: Aleksandra Maciejewska, Amaranta Velarde González, Kay Patru, Angelina Deck / Tuin der Lusten – a garden project by René Jansen as part of the harvest festival

Unspectacular Bodies - performance/installation at Nederlands Architectuurinstituut in Rotterdam as part of the festival ´Wereld van Witte de With´

Friday, 11th (6:30 pm) / Saturday 12th (9:30 pm) / Sunday 13th (4:30 pm) of September

After a long period celebrating mobility, I come to realize, that the materiality of the body, its sculptural property in relation to the space in which is immersed and its inherent theatrical presence, appeals to me more than the exploration of the modernist conception of dance as a “being toward movement”. With that attainment in mind, with this event, I aim to present a body that is not necessarily subjugated to the fascination for the kinetic, but a body with potential for movement when such does not get actualized because it is consciously resisted. The bodies exhibited will look like discarded objects, goods that nobody desires. They will be almost inert, like precarious popular icons that insist in performing when at first sight there is no longer nothing exciting expressed through them able to capture and sustain the attention of the spectators.

Concept: Bruno Listopad / Composer: Dirk Haubrich / Performers: Aleksandra Maciejewska, Amaranta Velarde González, Kay Patru, Rainer Müntinga / Architecture: Ivo Vrouwe, Marieke van Hensbergen / Co-Production: NAi Nederlands Architectuurinstituut , Korzo Producties, Danslab / Location: Arcades of NAi Nederlands Architectuurinstituut, Museumpark 25, Rotterdam


Against Architecture will be performed next Friday the 26th of June at the Vondelpark Openluchttheater (Amsterdam). The entrance is free and the performance starts at 21:00 hrs.

The title was taken from a book from Denis Hollier on the writings of Georges Bataille. For Bataille the edifice was an oppressive representation of a transcendent power that exerts control on its inhabitants. Within the context of this performance, we use the term Architecture as a metaphor for the “theological” structure of theatrical representation, in which the bodies of performers are inscribed by the desires of a master that transcends the object of his creation.

With this work we construct a parallel between the theories of The Situationist International (a movement composed by a group of activists that under the direction of Guy Debord, fought against the alienation in society created by what they called “the society of the spectacle”), and the despotic machinery of theatrical representation, that conflicts with the performers aspiration to attain unity with the work of art.

In Against Architecture two performers reveal the friction between their identity and the role they undertake. Against Architecture aims to question choreography ontology and the politics of its making.

Concept: Bruno Listopad / Choreography: Bruno Listopad in collaboration with the dancers: Amaranta Velarde González, Angelina Deck / Music: Dirk Haubrich with additional music of Frank Bretschneider and The Platters / Props: Edwin Kolpa / Costumes: Edith Ordelman, Bruno Listopad / Against Architecture is een Korzo Productie, mede mogelijk gemaakt door het Ministerie van OCW, Gemeente Den Haag, Nederlands Fonds voor de Podiumkunsten+

Self-construction as Methodology Saturday June 20th / 5pm / ‘Het Wilde Weten’ in Rotterdam as part of ‘The Other Site’ exchange project between the artists places: ‘Het Wilde Weten’ & DCR

Program

4.00pm Live film / muziek ‘Angel Alley’ by Petra van der Schoot & Piet-Jan van Rossum

5.00pm Performance / installation by Bruno Listopad (DANSLAB)

8.00pm Party with DJ’s of DCR & Het Wilde Weten

With this performance/installation I will attempt to explore the body outside the theatrical frames I am accustomed to work with when conceiving for regular theatre venues. The event will include:

Disorder The unfocused simultaneity of events.

Obscurity The rejection of dramaturgical triggers through the manipulation of the actions of the performers in time and space.

Unspectacular-ness A considerable disproportion between craftsmanship and the duration of the event, avoiding a tension bow.

Redundancy The hyper dramatisation of the event through hyperbolic deformation, voluntary disorientation and dysfunctional precariousness.

Indulgence A self-referential exploration detached from an attempt towards authenticity and transparency of the process.

Aleatoricism The development of “consciousness” through chance, disjunction of meanings, and illogical encounters with “other” sort of bodies, both material and virtual.

Timelessness The attempt at the exploration of “new” subjectivity through the production of a entity foreign to “itself”. Neither pre or post human, but out of joint with its time. “

Performers: Aleksandra Maciejewska, Amaranta Velarde González, Angelina Deck, Eric Schrijver (Guest Artist)

You can read more about the process of Bruno’s Danslab research online www.danslab.nl More performances in other locations will follow.

Super Candy Solo with premiere the 13th of February in the Rotterdamse Schouwburg, taking place in the triple-bill program Xtra-Xtra Large by Dance Works Rotterdam. Check for tour dates at www.danceworksrotterdam.nl

We started the process by talking with each other. Our conversations revolved upon various subjective and objective issues. A common interest we wanted to explore was the desire to obliterate the limiting stereotypical identity in which we encapsulate ourselves and are encapsulated by others. I believe that the disruption of the stereotypes can be achieved without totally loosing the recognizable contours of the representational (the figurative in this case). The latter becomes the territory to depart from towards an indiscernible blur of ‘self-production’. We found inspiration in glossy magazines, Pop Art books and documentaries. From there we ventured into dancing, speaking and even shopping. Dizzy with the influence of the aesthetics of popular culture, the nostalgia for the absent, the ‘deterritorialization’ of representation and the effects generated by our mutual encounter, we came up with a grotesque body which we did not fully recognize whilst being uncertain where it was leading us. All in all, we created an unstable entity foreign to itself, a visceral body calling for contact in a striated voice.

Choreography and text: Bruno Listopad in collaboration with Helene Pieren / Performer: Helene Pieren / Additional Text: Contact door by Serge Gainsbourg / Music: Let Me Eat Cake written by Kraus and performed by him with a computer and ¼” tape in 2007. Compiled in the album Dirt Beneath the Daydream – A Collection of Sound from Aotearoa/New Zeeland / Stage design: Bruno Listopad / Lighting design: Bruno Listopad / Costume design: Edith Ordelman, Bruno Listopad / Lighting technique: Kees van Leeuwen, Justin Menzo / Sound technique: Taco Pieters / Running time: ±27 minutes / Special thanks to Edwin Kolpa for the help and advise

Inscription Installation/performance performed by Aleksandra Maciejewska, Amaranta Velarde González and Angelina Deck, taking place in NEST winter exhibition Un Salon du DCR, 17th Jan. 2009 at 16:00, The Hague www.nestruimte.nl

Store: You can buy Dirk Haubrich's original soundtrack for Thoughts unsaid, then forgotten pressed in vinyl. There are two different compositions in two different colours, white and blue. photo: Dirk Haubrich

Thoughts unsaid, then forgotten

Thursday 13th Nov. 21.00 (premiere)

Friday 14th Nov. 19.00

Saturday 15th Nov. 21.00

CaDance Festival Korzo5HOOG

BINK36, Binckhorstlaan 36, Den Haag

070.363 75 40 www.korzo.nl

Saturday 15th of Nov. at 20:00 there will be an introduction to the work of Bas Jan Ader by Rein Wolfs, director of the Kunsthalle Fridericianum Kassel.

Friday 21st and Saturday 22nd Nov. - Frascati 2 - from 19:30
Viewing of 6 short films of Bas Jan Ader. The Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen owns an important part of the small oeuvre of Bas Jan Ader. Before the start of the performance, there will be a viewing of the short films of Ader in Frascati 2.

Friday 21st Nov - Frascati 2 - 19:30
Rene Daalder will give a lecture on the life and work of Bas Jan Ader.


Friday 21st and Sat 22nd Nov. - Frascati 2 - 22:00
A viewing of the documentary Here is always somewhere else (2006) by Rene Daalder about the life and work of Bas Jan Ader.

In Bruno Listopad’s recent projects, the body of the performer is not used as a mediator of concepts but as a site within which concepts are generated by means of an encounter of diverse artistic collaborators that together generate a conceptual multiplicity which is immanent to the creative process. 
These projects are in part self referential explorations wherein the subject matters that are addressed cannot be dissociated from the documentary registration of the creative process. The projects question the ontology of dance, choreographic necessity and the relation of ethics towards aesthetics. They reveal the internal politics of their own creation, exposing its inherent struggles, misunderstandings and the possible failure in reaching a resolution.

Bruno Listopad’s new performance explores:

1- Self-reference: Three performers utilize fiction and the idea of ‘self’ in an attempt to comment upon the nature of the creative process.

2- Communication: Three performers inquire both formally and informally the notion that the role of the artist is to ‘communicate’.

3- Nonsense: Three performers embody in various ways the archetype of the Fool/Idiot/Madman in order to probe the boundaries of speech, acceptable behaviour and the logical, forcing these towards a possible point of disintegration.

4- Style: Three performers question the accepted convention that an artist should have his own unique signature, the artist’s work being part of an oeuvre which is ‘sui generis’.

5- Physics: “All is falling” (Bas Jan Ader). Three performers indulge in the unavoidable power of gravitational force and the finite nature of existence by means of performative mechanisms which involve failure and repetition.

Concept: Bruno Listopad / Choreography and text: Bruno Listopad together with the performers / Performers: Aleksandra Maciejewska, Amaranta Velarde González, Angelina Deck / Original music by Dirk Haubrich, additional music by the performers and the traditional Russian song Black Eyes played by Balalaika-Orchestra Alexander Bochensky / Set design: Edwin Kolpa / Light design: Bas Vissers, Edwin Kolpa and Bruno Listopad / Costume design: Edith Ordelman and Bruno Listopad / Rehearsal director and advisor: Gunvor Karlsen / Additional text exerts from: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carol, Walt Disney movie Alice in Wonderland, At the Vanishing Point: A Critic Looks at Dance by Marcia Siegel, Sentences on Conceptual Art by Sol LeWitt / Photo: Luis da Cruz with image of Bas Jan Ader "I 'm too said to tell you" from the collection of Museum Boijmans van Beuningen / Title: taken from an installation/performance from Bas Jan Ader / Thanks to Danslab and M.A Kroes

Thoughts unsaid, then forgotten is a co production of Korzo producties and Stichting Disjointed Arts and is financially supported by Netherlands Fund for the Performing Arts and the City of Rotterdam, department of Art & Culture.