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. 

Mirrored Anatomic Obliteration installation/performance in the exhibition Mirrored Years by Yayoi Kusama, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen

Saturday 27th Sep. 13:15 and 14:45 / Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Museumpark 18-20, Rotterdam
/ 010.441 94 00, 010.441 94 75  www.boijmans.nl 

“When we obliterate nature and our bodies with polka dots, we become part of the unity of our environment, I become part of the eternal, and we obliterate ourselves in love” - Yayoi Kusama

The performance Mirrored Anatomic Obliteration is motivated by the essay Desiring Production of Yayoi Kusama by Midori Matsui. While numerous scholarly essays and Kusama herself attributed the “inhuman drive and impersonal mechanicity” of her work as result of a pathological obsession, Matsui in her essay interprets Kusama’s repetitive creative drive through the lenses of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari philosophy of desire. The author looks upon Kusama joyful repetitive creative productivity not as a pathology consequence of an Oedipal lack, but as an affirmation of an  “unlimited energy of life” that is not personal and cannot be regulated.

Concept: Bruno Listopad / Performers: Aleksandra Maciejewska, Amaranta Velarde González / Costume Design: Bruno Listopad / Photo of Yayoi Kusama in her installation

erva daninha in Springdance Festival 08

Saturday 26 Apr. 20:30 /
Theater Kikker, Ganzenmarkt 14 Utrecht / 030.231 96 66  www.springdance.nl 

In erva daninha the new Korzo production by Bruno Listopad, the choreographer compares the toughness and flexibility of weeds, which grow in spite of restriction or oppression, even through concrete or asphalt, with the essence of art; a flowing creative force that always finds new ways to express itself. The ‘concrete’ that art has to break through is the whole complex of parochialism, fixed identities, established convictions, binding codes, morals and customs, and the dominant ‘zeitgeist’ with its characteristic reduction to economic values. Every one of these is a construction, meant to give us something to hold on to and to establish order and coherency. At the same time, however, they stand in the way of looking at life afresh.
In erva daninha (Portuguese for weed), Bruno Listopad and his dancers see life as a celebration of continuous creation. They surrender themselves to a lively search for new forms and new meanings that change the performance from moment to moment and make the stage blaze with pluriformity.
Erva daninha is a choreography that affirms life in all its vivacity.

Concept: Bruno Listopad / Choreography: Bruno Listopad in collaboration with Gunvor Karlsen and the dancers: Angelina Deck, Dario Tortorelli, Keyna Nara, Philipp Fricke, Aleksandra Maciejewska / composition: Dirk Haubrich /set design: Edwin Kolpa /costume design: Edith Ordelmann /lighting design: Niko van der Klugt