International edition of New Sh*t curated by Thjerza Balaj
As a rider taming a wild horse, Courtney May Robertson looks at the struggle between embracing one’s desires and regulating behaviour in accordance with societal pressures. In a quartet by Andreas Hannes the magnetism and binding between bodies and space intensifies and creates a tantalising atmosphere for an otherworldly dance. In a solo, Alexandre Fandard rehabilitates “the youth from the suburbs” as a symbol. Gergő D. Farkas investigates the collapsing borders between the living and the inorganic, the existing and the unreal by approaching the body as an apparatus driven by impulses and emotions.
We are excited to present these four selected performances of younger choreographers with origins in Scotland, France, Greece and Hungary. The artists are in the top twenty in Europa right now as part of the most promising emerging choreographers by the European network Aerowaves The Twenty22.
The evening program
the pleasure of stepping off a horse when it’s moving at full speed / Courtney May Robertson
Comme un symbole / Alexandre Fandard
Deep Fake / Gergő D. Farkas
Warping Soul / Andreas Hannes
Party / After the performances we invite you to a festive hangout with DJ Nah Care and open bar. DJ Nah Care´s music draws inspiration from his Kurdish roots and the electronic scene from club edits to fast paced techno.
The performances and artists
the pleasure of stepping off a horse when it’s moving at full speed / Courtney May Robertson
As a starting point for this short solo, Courtney takes a metaphor for self-control; a rider taming a wild horse. She looks at the struggle between embracing one’s desires, and regulating behavior in accordance with societal pressures. Visual projections encapsulate Courtney within an octagon. Through a combination of poetry, dance, and song, she travels across landscapes of personal desires, memories, and conflicts. The space acts like a time capsule; intimate home videos are spliced with samples from YouTube, documentaries, and old films. the pleasure of stepping off a horse when it’s moving at full speed is Courtney’s attempt to embrace the, sometimes messy, contradictions that make up a multifaceted human.
Courtney May Robertson is a Scottish performer based in Rotterdam. Upon graduating in 2013, she joined Club Guy & Roni’s Poetic Disasters Club and has since performed extensively across Europe in the work of Jan Martens, Connor Schumacher and Florentina Holzinger, amongst others. She began creating her own small-scale / DIY produced performances in 2015. As of 2020, she is an ‘artist in residence’ at ICK Artist Space in Amsterdam. As a trained dancer Courtney’s work starts with the body, but spans various disciplines including video, generative art and writing. Recurring topics in her work revolve around a widely spread phenomenon she has defined as ‘the relentless desire to dominate’. courtneymayrobertson
Comme un symbole / Alexandre Fandard
Alexandre Fandard takes on the image of a young man from the urban margins; his postures and the fear he arouses. In turn barbaric, riffraff, potential terrorist and eternal stranger, the “youth from the suburbs” is often a masculine figure, despised, adulated, sacrificed or eroticised. Alexandre Fandard’s creations as a visual artist and choreographer never remain fixated in one form and bring to the stage all these rock-solid archetypes. In this new research in solo, he rehabilitates the youth from the suburbs as a symbol. The dancer wears the French flat on his jacket and uses this symbol as an attempt to redeem this figure while transforming himself into a national product in its own right.
Alexandre Fandard is a French visual artist and choreographer who always seeks new ways to express himself. His choreographic writing stems from the need to portray what is not said with words. After a brief stint at the International Dance Academy of Paris, he started performing works directed by Brett Bailey such as Exhibit b for three years consecutively, while continuing his work as a painter. This experience reinforced his taste and his desire to see space, movement and dance through a radical pictorial perspective, where the image speaks as much as the body. alexandrefandard.com
Deep Fake / Gergő D. Farkas
Deep Fake is a series of events which speculate upon copy, and inauthenticity and investigates new possibilities of coexistence.
The piece challenges the monocracy of the solo by gently directing the spectator’s attention to the decentralized performance of sound, light, and object, turning the space into a living and breathing entity. By approaching the body as an apparatus driven by impulses and emotions, Deep Fake investigates the collapsing borders between the living and the inorganic, the existing and the unreal, with the structures that secretly (re)produce these binaries.
In Deep Fake, the performer is accompanied by composer Márton Csernovszky’s sweet yet eerie, sensitive yet expansive music, and by a tender object called Grid.
As the lovechild of cross-disciplinary aspirations and millennial greed, Deep Fake extends its invisible tentacles from the stage to the interwebs and takes over the two-euro domain deep-fake.world to become virtual and remain virtually immortal.
Gergő D. Farkas (they/them) is a choreographer and dancer currently based in Stockholm and Budapest. Gergő choreographs spaces where (non-)humans and (in)corporeal are equally super welcome to dance. Sometimes (actually, quite often), Gergő relates to dance as a hyper object.
Currently, they are a resident artist of Performing Gender and tour their piece Deep Fake as a part of the Aerowaves Twenty22 selection. deep-fake.world
Warping Soul / Andreas Hannes
The dancers emerge within a space that is constantly in transit. At the mercy of external forces, they move within movement. Through the disorientation and reorganisation of bodies and space, Andreas Hannes explores the dynamics of bouncing and warping*. By questioning the body’s agency, he aims to intensify the magnetism and binding between bodies and space to create a tantalising atmosphere for an otherworldly dance. ‘Warping Soul’ was inspired by the practice of continuous skipping (as in skipping down the street) that Andreas Hannes has been developing since 2017. Key elements of his practice were road-trips, transiting landscapes and aerodynamic forces. *warp: to bend or turn from the (original) direction or course
Andreas Hannes is an Greek eclectic maker who explores gravity and aerodynamic forces. He uses rhythm and vibration as a source for informing and revealing the body within environments. Growing up in a musical environment, Andreas Hannes danced extensively in the living room. After completing his studies in classical percussion at the University of Macedonia in Thessaloniki (Greece), he moved to the Netherlands to follow his passion for film. He worked as an independent director and producer of short films and he co-founded Small House Productions (2011-2015). In 2018, Andreas graduated from School for New Dance Development with the performance The City. Andreas Hannes summarises his artistic work under the notion of relational, physical and metaphysical distance. He investigates by playing with the proximities and tensions between bodies, traditions and disciplines which, at first glance, might not be considered relevant or engaging. The spectacle, entertainment, science fiction and time tenses fuel his creative force, with all the social and political implications they bring along. www.andreashannes.com
The Guest Curator of New Sh*t Vol. 6
For each edition of New Sh*t, a younger guest curator is invited to put together a progressive program of choreographers whom the curator believes to be the artists of tomorrow! The curator for Vol. 6 is the Copenhagen-based Thjerza Balaj (She/Her). She is a Norwegian / Kosovo-Albanian multi-hyphenate artist, working with performance, fashion design, and film. Immediacy and intimacy are important elements in her works. Her choreographic practice deals with the female gaze, power dynamics and the uncanny. Playing with shifting intensities is a consistent approach in her seemingly hard-core yet ephemeral practice. Thjerza lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark.
About the platform New Sh*t
With the recurring format New Sh*t, Dansehallerne checks in with what’s new in the choreographic landscape in Denmark.
Since New Sh*t was launched in 2020 the popular platform has been happening twice yearly. This is the first edition where we invite international choreographers for the platform.
Photo: Warping Soul by Andreas Hannes, photographer Floyd Renton
