on beauty
Photos by Ch. Glaus | L. Pillonel | Video
Choreography/ direction: Béatrice Jaccard, Peter Schelling Choreographic collaboration: Susanne Schneider Performers: Budlana Baldanova, Mirjam Gasser, Béatrice Jaccard, Raphaël de Riedmatten, Peter Schelling, Viacheslav Zoubkov Dramaturgy: Béatrice Jaccard Music composition & light design: François Gendre Production: Beatrice Rossi, Susanne Schneider
A cooperation of Company Drift & Company BewegGrund
A coproduction with Dampfzentrale Berne and Theater Roxy Basle
Première 26.03.2010, Dampfzentrale Berne
further performances: Theater Roxy, Basle (ch), Intern. Tanzwoche, Dresden (d), Okkupation - Tanzhaus Zurich (ch), Wildwuchs - Theater Roxy, Basle (ch)
In 'on beauty', six performers of different sex, age, nationality and physical prowess lead us into a Shakespearian world in which physical and mental integrity is an endangered and fragile good.
We are in search of the other, longing for diversity, and we are resolutely turning our backs on glossy aesthetics that are about as satisfying as sugar water.
The ever-present and desperate effort to achieve perfection in accordance with the flawless norm simply bores us to death.
The point of 'on beauty' is to overturn values. The refusal to recognize borders and to simply tolerate limitations leads us directly into the garden of beauty where people’s multifarious forms of appearance can be found.
We guarantee that, in 'on beauty', we will avoid the beautiful golden mean.
'Fair is foul and foul is fair' Shakespeare, Macbeth
Company Drift is attracted to borderline situations and aims to combine deep surreal meaning with a playful lightness. Fantastic colourfulness shimmers through their work’s stringently structured surfaces. Sometimes the movement hardly penetrates a terrifying confinement, sometimes it opens up endless worlds on stage. And gentle, touching encounters become confusing, frightening and limitless eruptions. It is very seldom that a dance company like Company Drift can, at one and the same time, make its audience laugh and yet provoke deep reflection. This places Company Drift among the best groups that the Swiss dance scene has presently to offer and makes them equally successful on the international scene where they have presented their work in 30 countries.
Company Drift’s artistic directors Béatrice Jaccard and Peter Schelling have worked together since 1987. They have received the Swiss Award for Dance and Choreography 2007 for their complete works.
Company BewegGrund is the ideal partner for Company Drift’s effort to stage people’s different forms of appearance: it has great experience in working on stage with disabled and non-disabled dancers.
The association BewegGrund was founded in 1998 and stands for equal rights, self-determination, equal opportunity and integration. The goal is a natural togetherness between people with and without disabilities in cultural projects. BewegGrund supports integrative dance. It regularly offers professionally led courses, realises workshops with choreographers from Switzerland and other countries, and works in the schools. In addition to pedagogical work, which is often the first contact with dance for people with disabilities, the work on stage of the company BewegGrund is important: it offers role models for disabled people and shows as a matter of course that dance is not restricted to perfect bodies.
Company Drift is one of the few companies in Switzerland to have achieved such a level of experience and continuity. Their theatrical, whimsical, humorous and unfathomable access to subjects that Drift brings on stage is ideal and challenging for dancers with disabilities.
Review
„…BewegGrund and Cie Drift approach the respective physical differences in a refreshingly uncomplicated way… Whimsically exaggerated ventures into stereotypical scenes from Shakespeare dramas that culminate in a wonderfully savoured murder scene… dancing swordplay in which the art of physical control becomes apparent… In between, numerous fine, almost poetic moments… in which the partners’ handicaps are handled with gentle consideration but also with an unforced naturalness and intimacy… Der Bund, Bern 29.3.2010
“…bodies and extremities are assigned their own roles in a piece that upends value judgments and renounces sublime symmetry… Sometimes a dancer has to catch his autonomous head, bring back his feet from two opposing directions and sort all movements anew – again and again… A hopeless battle takes place against oneself that poses the question of our multiplicity – but for once giving more room to the body than the soul… bizarre nostalgia, levity and profundity… a constantly enduring and sprawling swim against the cultural mainstream…Badische Zeitung, Deutschland, 28.8.2010
“… ‘on beauty’ stages the borderlines of beauty, handicaps and observation with fantasy, passion and sensitivity… it is anything other than a simple effort at integration. Intelligent and artistic, humorous and touching… They join in sometimes grotesquely funny scenes: they fight and cry, kill and die in synchronicity…” MittellandZeitung, Schweiz, 28.8.2010
Supported: Burgergemeinde Bern, Bürgi-Willert-Stiftung, Cerebral - Schweiz. Stiftung für das cerebral gelähmte Kind, Ernst Göhner Stiftung, Fachstelle Kultur Kanton Zürich, Familien-Vontobel-Stiftung, kulturelles.bl, Kulturförderung der Stadt Zürich, KulturStadtBern, Migros Kulturprozent, Pro Helvetia – Swiss Arts Council, Pro Infirmis Bern, Schweizer Paraplegiker Stiftung, Stanley Thomas Johnson Stiftung, Stiftung Denk an mich, SWISSLOS/ Kultur Kanton Bern
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