At the finale there is soup, at the beginning a game with gravity. “Gravity and other attractions” opens the 10th Grenzgänger-Festival in the Carl-Orff-Saal of the Gasteig on Friday, July 1st. Followed by “Dueto” by Diana Niepce: two short pieces that open up the space in which inclusive theater is currently moving. In “Dueto” the Portuguese dancer and choreographer, paralyzed after a trapeze accident, celebrates “the body in its rawness” and vulnerable fragility. “Gravity” comes from the company Un-Label, one of those pioneers in matters of art and inclusion, whose name suggests that they reject stamps and pigeonholes.
The people of Cologne have developed something they call “Aesthetics of access”. They consciously use the tools to create accessibility in an artistic way. In “Gravity”, audio description and sign language describe the dance and everything else that happens on stage, not only for those theatergoers who depend on it, but also for everyone else on a new aesthetic level. When Lolo (Sarah “Sarena” Bockers) tells in English and in words how she and Tiki first met, Dodzi tells Dougban the same thing from his perspective while signing. Those who cannot see can get an impression of the events from the audio track, which documents the events in minute detail but is also poetic.
Sounds complicated, but it is already exciting in the video, which offers different opportunities for experience, but does not give anyone a complete view of this “circle of attractions”, which ranges from the first state of uncertainty to the bang of falling in love to short snippets of scenes from everyday relationships , which look like leafing through a photo album. Images, sounds, levels of description – “everything meshes wonderfully here,” enthuses Lorenz Seib, who directs the Grenzgänger Festival together with Anette Spola, which for the anniversary has several new partners on board, including the Volkstheater, the Luise Cultural Center and the Gasteig Has. This means that inclusive stage art has also arrived spatially throughout Munich. The Berlin dancer Angela Alves even set up her bed, in which she grants individual audiences in “Rest”, in the middle of the town hall.
“We never set an issue.”
According to Seib, the fact that there are a number of dance-related productions among the twelve invited productions from seven countries this year is not a directional decision. “We never set ourselves a theme, but always looked for something new and exciting.” This time there was a lot of dancing – and prime examples of self-empowerment. In “Frock”, the title of which alludes less to the phonetically similar “Frog” and more to the (eighties) skirts that all men wear here, the Stopgap Dance Company from Surrey conquers the public space – a company in which there are obviously dancers who make bigger leaps or deeper curtseys than others. But the colleague in the wheelchair also encourages the others to invent movements. Master of this is the Viennese choreographer, performer and dance theorist Michael Turinsky, whose solo “Heteronomous Male” invited in 2018 was a wonderful, productive overload. According to Seib, he also shows in “Precarious Moves” that his comparative immobility is just a type of mobility that we are simply not yet used to: “It may seem awkward, but also more precise, and I also find it more beautiful. A mischievous and also very funny evening!”
Theater Festival Grenzgänger, July 1st to 10th, various locations, www. Grenzgaenger-theater.de