Four students from the HZT Berlin are guest artists in residence in Potsdam. Together with performers from Berlin and Potsdam, they are working on the relationship between inside and outside, borders and connections, interiors and enclosures.
Valentina Menz Nash (Chile): Zeitbruch
What role do time and rhythm play in dance, but also in our everyday lives? Valentina Menz Nash invites dancers from Potsdam to share physical practices and reflections on this theme as part of her research and to deepen together elements such as rhythm, pulse and silence as experiences of the collective through improvisation. In an intensive process over eight days, a score will be developed together in which our cultural and temporal fragility is inscribed. At the conclusion of the project, a work in progress will be shared in public space through a live stream.
Valentina Menz Nash is a dancer and arts educator. Her movement research focuses on traditional Afro dances from Latin America and contact improvisation. She is currently researching the intersections between Afro-dances and practices of improvisation in contemporary dance.
Akiles (Iraq): Körperlicher Dialog
By experimenting with simple movement sequences and interactions, Akiles aims to observe and investigate social communication structures within society. With his group, he explores the influence that the social environment and the effects of COVID19 measures, such as distance regulations, have on people. How does the relationship and the relation to what surrounds us change? In improvisation, a physical practice is developed and work is done with presence in space to experience new levels of communication. Rehearsals will take place in the outdoor space on Schiffbauergasse. In the course of the research, movement material is also experimented with in the city centre. Akiles works in the residency with people with and without previous experience in performative formats who are interested in movement in public space and who have a desire to dance - with objects, buildings, cars, trees and / or passers-by.
Akiles comes from Iraq and works with dance and choreography in social projects, especially dance and movement projects with young refugees. He explores the potential of dance and choreography in relation to building and shaping relationships.
Ari Burghard (Germany): Von den Sinnen
Ari Burghard works with a group to develop a shared practice that starts from different levels of sensory perception. The starting point is the desire to see. They devote themselves to the light conditions of different places and times, experiment with gazes and experience how the focus of a sense affects movements. Different ways of looking are taken in somatic exercises and dance improvisations, which are shared with the group in guided writing games, conversations and performative formats. At the end, the results from the investigations will be scattered as moving messages in the public space.
Ari Burghard studied Expressive Arts in Social Transformation and Sociology in Hamburg and has since worked at the intersection of art, culture and politics in collective-organised projects. Since 2018 she has been active in the artist:inside collective POSSY and in 2019 she founded HALLO:Radio.
Veronika Heisig (Germany): Raumzeitrendern
In the residency, Veronika Heisig and her performers are dedicated to the presence of casualness, the beauty of the recurring, which unfolds in the permanence of everyday routines. The automatisms that ensure the reliability of the everyday muddle and yet leave a taste of the tiresome rut from which it is necessary to break out. Which variations of the same processes make us pause and the normality with which we devote ourselves to supposed banalities seem absurd or even meaningful? Starting from places and objects of everyday life, they bring to light sequences of movement that have become self-evident. They examine their nestings, carefully take them apart and recompose the casualness of everyday presence.
Veronika Heisig is a choreographer and dance artist. Her dance roots lie in contemporary dance and various influences from urban dance to Japanese martial arts shape her movement language. She studied stage dance at the Folkwang University of the Arts and contemporary dance at the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in London. In her work, she creates performances that explore the poetry of everyday objects between movement and sound.
