the listening body

Together with Chris Leuenberger, Nina Wollny and the composer Jetzmann, Jenny Beyer addresses the emotive and expressive effect of music on dance, using three piano pieces by Frédéric Chopin as the basis for her choreography. The performers dance with the music, but also to it, against it, rushing ahead or lagging behind it. Thus, they confront the pathos of classical music with the desire to abandon oneself to it through listening and dancing. By doing so, they create a fragile cooperation between hearing and moving. When does the listening body cling to the music, and where does friction arise due to the need to distance oneself from the music, to move away from it, to meet it on one’s own terms? Is there a contemporary code for dancing to music? Duet explores the interdependence of dance and music, how it stirs our emotions, it examines the analogies and contrarieties of its expressive movements, inviting us to raise the question: How do we listen to music when we see it and why does it move dance so much?

PREMIERE

April 30, 2014 at Kampnagel Hamburg

Further Performances: May 1 – 4, 2014 at Kampnagel Hamburg and February 26 and 27, 2015 at Theater Freiburg

DUETT is a production by Jenny Beyer and Kampnagel, funded by the Ministry of Culture and Media Hamburg, with support from Dampfzentrale Bern and K3|Tanzplan Hamburg.

The guest performance of DUETT at KuB Bad Oldesloe is funded by Danceland – Guest-performance partnership programme of the German Federal Cultural Foundation. Funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media Hamburg.

Photos: Thies Rätzke