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Learn more about dance in Munich! In TTmag dance creators talk about their aesthetics and approach, dance formats and Munich dance topics are put under the microscope! |
StephanieFelber_web.jpg) Conversations about pieces Stephanie Felber: Is there a world beyond the image? Stephanie, in your new piece you deal with images, more precisely with icons, images that are exaggerated in their meaning. What is an icon for you? We actually started out from religious icons. What interested me in the icons of the Orthodox Church - I even have one hanging in my house - is on the one hand the reference to the "behind", to transcendence, and on the other hand this form of overpresence; with all the gold it really screams: Bang, there it is. And as a third aspect, there is the worship, the adoration, the process of turning oneself towards it. During the rehearsals, we actually dealt a lot with different forms of religious representation, their form and function, and also with performativity in religions. It is not a religious piece, but the handling of images - concrete ones like Orthodox icons, Catholic devotional images, but also abstract ones like mandalas - the quasi mediating aspect to the "behind", we tried to translate these different possibilities into choreography. Apart from religious icons, where do you also see the iconic, what else kept you busy during the rehearsals? Of course, we ended up with pop culture, with film icons, and also with icons of reign or politics. Whereby we really noticed with all of them that we had difficulties accepting that completely. Okay, you have an icon - Marilyn Monroe - fine, but then what. And we asked ourselves: do we actually have our personal icons? That was interesting too, that it's kind of hard to say you have an icon. And yet there are collective icons - Madonna, Karl Lagerfeld, Pelé, etc. - so from society's point of view: yes, of course, but as an individual dialogue - difficult. The exciting question is: at what point does society say that this is now an icon and how is it then staged? Or can one stage oneself as an icon and therefore already be an icon? Of course, it's about media, about dissemination, about overpresence, which then inscribes itself in the collective image memory. Charley Chaplin's feet: everyone immediately knows what it is after two seconds. It was exciting to find out when certain movements are legible and produce images for us. To put it simply, everyone recognizes it at once and associates it with something. But surely that also depends on the generation? Absolutely, and that was actually interesting in the team. I don't know exactly, but we have a cast from 25 to 63 years old, so you've covered a bit of ground there. Overall, I have the impression that there are many icons that work across generations, but the further you look into the present, the more fast-paced and less distinctive it becomes perhaps, but the more blatantly self-staged. We're not going in that direction with the piece, but perhaps today's true icons are influencers - at least if you take the staged, the idolized, and the number of "followers." The difference is, perhaps, you don't have an iconic image to go with it that references everything, like the photo of Albert Einstein sticking out his tongue or Marilyn Monroe in a white dress on the subway platform. How do you translate the images on stage? We work with video and with the dancers' bodies. On the live level, I work with the idea of tableaux vivants and with video editing techniques, whereby we translate the latter to the performer bodies, which means that you virtually go into the edit with the live bodies. The effect is that the dancers' bodies look partly as if they were video and you were scrolling back and forth. This gives such a different physicality that you wouldn't think of a dance technique or any other dance process. In the video, we work with both the original images, which won't always be legible because we keep overwriting them, and with the duplicated dancers' bodies. Does "Is there a world beyond the image" also overlap with your last piece "Apon Paron", which looked at the interaction of the two- and three-dimensional, the question of reality and projection? Yes totally and also not at all. It overlaps because it actually wants the opposite. "Apon Paron" was about not being present. Sure, there was also the dancer in the original and his digital image as a kind of hologram. But it was about the absent, the disappearance. And now it's about being over-present, the over-present body. The body that is live on stage, but is also digitally staged 100 times - and then the question arises: Where do I look for the encounter, do I really look for it at eye level with the real performers? Or is it perhaps much, much better digitally - there are special effects, filters, glossier, whatever... This is also a question in connection with the icon: Does only the original have the aura and if it is reproduced millions of times, does it lose it? Or does this reproduction only give it a super aura. As you write in your text: an event between ecstasy of images and iconoclasm. Would you say that icons always provoke their destruction? I don't know if always, but they certainly make themselves contestable, they also have power over people. But not everyone adores the same thing; and if I don't understand why someone adores that... We also looked at the different types that Bruno Latour draws in his work "Iconoclash": One type that simply destroys the images inattentively, one that destroys them intentionally, one that destroys them but meanwhile generates 5000 new images... And in "Is there a world beyond the image" these techniques are - not obvious - but hidden are in there, sometimes they are adopted from the video, sometimes from the scene. But actually the title of the piece is also the question for the piece. We don't have to answer it, but we go on a journey with the audience to see if there is an answer. „Is there a world beyond the image” will take place July 29. – 31. Juli, always at 8:30 pm at schwere reiter: INFO More about Stephanie Felber: Website The interview was conducted by Simone Lutz, July 2022  Tanztendenz Munich e.V. is sponsored by the Munich Department of Arts and Culture |
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