DANCE ON ENSEMBLE

7 Dialogues

The 7 Dialogues conceived by DANCE ON ENSEMBLE resemble a musical and choreographic laboratory. For this project, each member of the company teamed up with a choreographer or director with the aim of creating a solo in the form of a self-portrait. To link everything together, the project’s artistic director, composer Matteo Fargion, offered them a single musical structure: that of Schubert’s Erlkönig, inspired by Goethe’s Erlking, which features a fantastic creature that haunts forests. Five extracts will be presented in the CN D’s spaces. For the project, the American dancer Ty Boomershine encountered the minimalist world of Beth Gill, an emerging New York-based choreographer, who studied at the Tisch School of the Arts. On the other side of the Atlantic, the German Brit Rodemund embarked on a collaboration with Lucy Suggate, an independent dancer known in the UK for her powerful and engaging solos. Others have chosen to work with artists trained in the theatre. The director and visual artist Tim Etchells, whose company, Forced Entertainment, is internationally renowned, took part with Jone San Martin, a former Forsythe dancer, who has also become a choreographer. As for Christopher Roman, artistic director of DANCE ON ENSEMBLE, he called on an unclassifiable artist who works at the frontier of performance, theatre and dance: Ivo Dimchev, currently based in Brussels. Then there is Frédéric Tavernini, a dancer and choreographer who trained at the dance school of the Opéra de Paris, whose career has taken him to the Béjart Ballet Lausanne, the Ballet de l’Opéra de Lyon and the Ballet de Marseille. All these original artists, whose style has been forged through decades of experience and collaborations, are linked together by Matteo Fargion’s musical tapestry in which dancers, choreographers and directors are all equal before the art of choreography.

Catalogue (First Edition)

For Christopher Roman, former dancer and director of the Forsythe Company, it was self-evident that William Forsythe should be part of the DANCE ON ENSEMBLE repertoire. For a long time based in Germany, the master created a duo titled Catalogue (First Edition) for it, which has, he says, a ‘complex, almost baroque’ choreography. Christopher Roman joins forces again with Jill Johnson, a past collaborator who also came into the orbit of Forsyth (alternating with Brit Rodemund). Together they explore their physical memory in the present.

A major figure in choreography for more than 30 years, William Forsythe has stretched the boundaries of classical and contemporary dance. Former director of the Frankfurt Ballet then the The Forsythe Company, today he works as an independent choreographer and visual artist.

Man Made

The title of the dance piece created by Jan Martens for DANCE ON ENSEMBLE is tinged with irony. At a time when the virtual and its traps are everywhere, Man Made draws on the memory and experience of five dancers to create a choreographic and social system rooted in the body. In a stripped-down world, everyone is listening – to others but also to Mattef Kuhlmey’s live electronic museum – to create in unison a dynamic, collaborative and profoundly human piece.

Aged just 33, Jan Martens is a rising star of Belgian dance. A prolific choreographer who seeks humanity in virtuosity, he recently presented The Dog Days Are Over and The Rule of Three in Paris.

Here is not here

When DANCE ON commissioned him for the first time, Rabih Mroué, a director who was born in Lebanon, had never worked with dancers. The result, Water Between Three Hands, combined his theatrical and textual knowledge with movement, with the dancers’ improvisations being set within graphic structures created by Rabih Mroué’s father. For this new work, premiered in February at the festival organised by DANCE ON ENSEMBLE at HAU (Berlin), he continues this unique dialogue, in which the performers are the creators of their own choreographic material.

In The Pixelated Revolution and So Little Time, the Lebanese director Rabih Mroué explores our visual culture. Based in Berlin for the past four years, he has collaborated with DANCE ON ENSEMBLE on two dance works.