Ayla Pierrot Arendt

Velsinger/Arendt

MASSIVE DREAMS 2018

A collaboration with Hamburg based Choreographer Antje Velsinger // a Velsinger/Arendt production.

Premiere in March 2018 in Tanzfaktur, Cologne // April 2018 at Lichthof Theater Hamburg.

Artistic direction: Ayla Pierrot Arendt & Antje Velsinger * Concept, choreography: Antje Velsinger * Stage, video: Ayla Pierrot Arendt * Dance, co-choreography: Verena Brakonier, Ursina Tossi, Antje Velsinger * Sound: Joaquin Macedo * Costume, stage design: Nina Divitschek * Dramatic advice: Anne Kersting * Production management: Suse Berthold & Sabina Stücker * sponsored by: Kulturbehörde Hamburg, Kunststiftung NRW, Kulturamt der Stadt Köln, Ministerium für Kultur und Wissenschaft des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen, Hamburgische Kulturstiftung * with kind support from: Tanzfaktur Köln, Lichthof Theater Hamburg, Kampnagel Hamburg * a production by Velsinger/Arendt

Photo by © Martin Rottenkolber. Images were taken during the Performance of MASSIVE DREAMS at Tanzfaktur Köln, March 23th, 2018.

Contrary to the neoliberalist formula - I grow, I accelerate, I innovate - "Massive Dreams" makes room for other growth resources. The choreographer Antje Velsinger and the artist Ayla Pierrot Arendt create expansive bodies from a need for completely different volumes and promises, the extent of which depends entirely on how much space they need, how much space there is and what space actually means. "Massive Dreams" is a broad concept: In a polyphonic interplay of dance, stage and sound installation, it formulates utopian expansion scenarios. And so - in the midst of huge, inflated lungs - hands reach for everything imaginable and hunger takes what it needs: Air to breathe, desire and rebellion.

Photo by © Martin Rottenkolber. Images were taken during the Performance of MASSIVE DREAMS at Tanzfaktur Köln, March 23th, 2018.

Velsinger/Arendt

The dancer and choreographer Antje Velsinger and the visual artist Janina Arendt, who primarily produces artistic works under the synonym Ayla Pierrot Arendt, met in 2013 at the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies in Giessen. Shortly thereafter their first collaboration began for you are here, a solo dance that shifts perspectives and fixed points in a trio with animated set design and live music in a choreographic cartography. As a result, Velsinger received the K3 scholarship in Hamburg and the next collaboration Haus, no Haus was premiered at Kampnagel in 2015. In this work, in which the two performers wrestle in a frenzy of involuntary nomadism and excessive mobility for a spatial connection, the abstract space fills with possible situations and places that result from the overlapping and superimposition of video material, sound elements and the alternating use of vibrating tent poles. The reduction to essential stage elements as well as the physical, visual compression through assemblage represent the interest in the joint work.