It is as tragic as it is fitting that the premiere of “Fäden” is now on the brink for the second time. Originally, the premiere should have taken place in the spring at the Munich Festival Dance. Now it is on the program for Thursday, with 2G Plus, reduced audience numbers and only if the incidence remains below the 1000 mark. “It’s nerve-wracking and heartbreaking, but we live in this time,” wrote Ivana Müller when asked last-minute how she was doing. This very special time has already entered the evening, which, like the re-enactment of Lucida Childs’ “Works in Silence” as part of the “Scores of Change” cooperation project between the Münchner Kammerspiele and the Berliner, sponsored by the German Federal Cultural Foundation Dance On Ensemble and the Stuk art center in Leuwen.
When the Croatian performance artist and choreographer was asked for the mixed ensemble in 2018, there was talk of an evening on the topic of age, which resulted from the fact that Dance On – in German: “Continue dancing” – unites professionals and other companies have already sorted out. In dance this is already the case from over 40, in classical ballet even much earlier. Even then, however, Müller was less interested in aging as an individual process with its predominantly negative connotations. She would much rather work with thoughts and images of maturation and transformation. “And that is what I mean in both a socio-political and a biological context.” Müller, who sometimes radically deconstructs the conventions of narration in her performances and sometimes disgusts it with gentle irony, originally focused on questions such as: “What is it like to age as a man or a woman, as a dancer or actor, at the place of one’s own birth or as an immigrant, public or private, lonely or in society? “
In the lockdown, larger philosophical questions became pressing
But already at the beginning of the rehearsal in February 2021, the time and self-perception was different due to the lockdown – and the focus of the company shifted in the direction of the larger philosophical questions. Nevertheless, there are still personal and biographically based statements in the text, which is very extensive for a dance performance. It cannot be ruled out that when reading some particularly cheerful and spooky passages of this “ongoing poem” one thinks that the artistic preoccupation with one’s own growth processes, failures and secret wishes also fulfilled semi-therapeutic functions during this time.
The lingua franca in the piece is English – according to Müller, “a fantastic Euro-English that opened up an interesting space for experiments. Jone San Martin also developed an art gibberish out of all the languages she speaks, which we all mysteriously could relate to . “
If you see sentences like “hasieran, edo obe said, actually Ich ne me souviens pas vraiment de que hubiera un inizio” on paper, you only understand train station. But it is possible that in what Ivana Müller describes as choreographic work, “in which movements, texts, voices, gestures, looks and stories dance together”, this puzzling accumulation of vocabulary also falls into place.
“We work together and without discipline”
The internationally active artist, who will also be performing at the Kammerspiele with her installation “Notes” in July 2022, has repeatedly surprised in the past with a free choice of omission. In “Working Titles” from 2010, the actors did not speak, but only carried puppets across the stage. In “While We Were Holding it Together”, with which Müller won the Impulse Festival Prize in 2007, she completely renounced movement. It won’t get that far this time, but whoever has seen the professionals of the Dance-On Ensemble in the online guest performances at Dance – the former Forsythe dancer Jone San Martin in a duet with Ty Boomershine (the artistic director of the troupe) in Rabih Mroué’s “Elephant”, for example, or Omagbitse Omagbemi in the highly precise “Works in Silence” reduced to walking movements – may be disappointed to learn that dance in the traditional sense will not appear in “threads” – and, according to Müller, “no music” either except those who create the movements and voices of the performers “. In addition to the aforementioned, these are the dancers Javier Arozena and Emma Lewis as well as the Kammerspiel actors Walter Hess, Jelena Kuljić, Anna Gesa-Raija Lappe and André Benndorff.
Ivana Müller, who is not staging her own ensemble for the first time, had already given the motto for the first online rehearsals: “We work together and without discipline” – in other words: We do not differentiate between what actors and dancers do. And this action is tied to the eponymous “threads” in many ways: from the “form of narration that is entangled and unraveled in questions and stories” to the very tangible woolen threads that appear in changing images (stage: Alix Boillot) Rolled up and down, woven together and separated again. Ivana Müller likes the tactile quality of this material and the everyday nature of this activity, which is also reminiscent of ancient myths: the Parzen spinning threads of life, the Ariadne thread or Penelope, who keeps her fate at a distance on the loom. “Working with your hands takes dedication, skill and time. And that is what the evening aims to encourage: to take time to reflect on the passing of time.”
“Threads”, premiere: Thursday, November 25th, 8 pm, Therese-Giehse-Halle, Münchner Kammerspiele. Lucinda Childs’ “Works in Silence” will make a guest appearance there on December 18th and 19th