Concept, choreography and performance: Jolika Sudermann and Alma Söderberg// Artistic advice: Igor Dobrićić, Martin Nachbar // Light design: Erik Gramberg, Tilo Schwarz// Production management: Stephanie Lühn // Producer: hetveem theater Amsterdam// Co-producers: zeitraumexit Mannheim, FFT Düsseldorf With kind support of Tanzfabrik Berlin
We share a fascination for spoken language. We have studied the way we talk to each other, first filming our conversations and then learning them by heart. Through zooming in on the body language, the intonation, the sounds of hesitation, the rhythm and the gaps in the speech we discovered amorphous mechanisms that seem to communicate more than the literal content of our conversation. Form and content were constantly inverted. Eventually we found ourselves back in the dictionary, tripping on words like love, game, thing, trick. As we repeat the word Love over and over again it leaves the personal narrative and becomes a landscape for anyone to enter. In terms of the content, those words became a frame for the work. Using this method we have ended up with rhythms, songs, dances and silences. The spoken language contains them all and we only had to pay attention to what is already there. Our obsession for talking brings about a concert of words and gestures which starts to tell the story of our talk on a level of music and dance.
Jolika Sudermann (DE) is a freelance theatremaker with a background in dance and environmental sciences. She studied dance theatre in Hamburg and graduated from the Mime course at the Amsterdamse Hogeschool voor de Kunsten in 2010. Jolika is based in Berlin and works as an artist in residence at Het Veem Theater Amsterdam where a.o. she produced the successful duet A Talk, a trip into the musicality of spoken language in collaboration with the Swedish choreographer Alma Söderberg. A Talk premiered in February 2011 and has since been shown more than 50 times in various European venues. It won the audience prize and the prize for a remarkable performance at the Stuttgarter Theaterpreis 2013. Her quintet PULSE got selected into the Aerowaves dance network and toured Europe in 2011/12. Her latest work Infanten premiered in November 2013. Apart from making work, she teaches at Tanzfabrik Berlin and engages in community dance and theatre projects with adolescents and asylum seekers. http://hetveemtheater.nl/en/maker/jolika-sudermann/ http://jolika.theaterblogs.de/
Alma Söderberg (SE) works as a choreographer, performer and performer-musician after having studied flamenco, contemporary dance and choreography. She graduated from SNDO, the choreography department in the Amsterdam arts academy, in 2010. Alma Söderberg makes performances where sound, movement and speech are equally important and in her eclectic practice she is constantly re-discovering how intertwined the three are. She has made three solo performances: Entertainment, Cosas and TRAVAIL, has an ongoing collaboration with Jolika Sudermann with whom she made A Talk and plays in the performance band John The Houseband. Her new work Idioter (a collaboration with visual artist and theatre maker Hendrik Willekens) will premiere in May 2014 during Kunstenfestivaldesarts Brussels.http://hetveemtheater.nl/en/maker/alma-soderberg/ http://almasoderberg.com
This performance on Locomotion is supported by Goethe Institute Skopje.
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