Isabelle Schad: Solo For Claudia and Josephine / Bodies of Light (2022)

Thursday, 30 November 2023 at 7:00 p.m.
Ljubljana Puppet Theatre, Šentjakobsko Stage

In 2016, German choreographer Isabelle Schad started a series of portrait solos for selected woman dance artists. The solo is danced simultaneously by Claudia Tomasi and Josephine Findeisen, with specific spatial, lighting and positional relationships complementing it with different compositional processes. The work is a visual and kinetic surplus.
At the turn of the nineteenth century, painting took an unprecedented leap forward, when industrial production of paints brought to the market the tube, in which even oil paints were prepared in advance. This revolutionised the speed of painting, and artists were suddenly able to capture unusual optical phenomena on canvas. Every few years, painting came to the galleries with revolutionary innovations. The body that produced such experiments was – as in the art of dance – locked into centuries-old disciplinary patterns. The past century, during which the dancing body gradually expelled the millennial devil from its cells, has produced remarkable kinetic results, created movement systems and expanded the possibilities of dance to infinity. During this period, specific physical literacy made it possible to read the displays of bodies with their political and social meanings without auxiliary texts. But in the twentieth century, the human body became the centre of social and political struggles. With a solo performed by two dancers, Isabelle Schad returns to cubist procedures, as the available anatomical-kinetic infrastructure with which the choreographer works allows for an articulation and a movement eloquence that provides the dance body with a meaningful voice. In the Solo for Claudia and Josephine, subtitled Bodies of Light, stories of formal movement diptych, identity and difference, simple and complex repetition, the individual and the collective, relational choreography, impersonation and disembodiment, and so on, unfold without unnecessary theatricality. Isabelle Schad’s work is perhaps an emblematic example of a dance approach that makes the contemporary dance public realise that no formal solution in dance can be exclusively textual, but is always also a contextual spectatorial task.

Duration: 50 min
Entry: 8/10 EUR