Press Release - Tanz im August

Press Release
12 August 2015
TANZ IM AUGUST – 27th International Festival Berlin
presented by HAU Hebbel am Ufer
13 August – 4 September 2015
Tickets: www.tanzimaugust.de
International festival Tanz im August gets underway. Opening week with
concentrated programme and numerous highlights.
HAU Hebbel am Ufer delighted by the increased budget granted by the
Berlin Senate.
Tickets still available for almost all events online or at the box office.
The new Magazin im August available from today in Berlin theatres. With background
information, interviews, rehearsal reports and portraits.
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Tanz im August 2015 mit: Sammlung Haubrok, Lucinda Childs, Elina Pirinen, Rosemary Butcher, Eisa
Jocson, deufert&plischke, Compagnie Marie Chouinard, Antony Hamilton & Alisdair Macindoe, Choy
Ka Fai, Cie Gilles Jobin, MOUVOIR / Stephanie Thiersch, TAO Dance Theatre, Isabel Lewis, Adam
Linder, Company SIGA, Geumhyung Jeong, La Veronal, KNCDC / Ahn Aesoon, Constanza Macras /
Dorky Park and much more
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Budget increase HAU Hebbel am Ufer / Tanz im August
At the end of last week the Berlin Senate published its budget proposal for 2016/2017. It
includes an annual subsidy of €650,000 for HAU Hebbel am Ufer. In June 2015 Annemie
Vanackere, artistic and managing director of the HAU, was already able to report a proposed
increase of €200,000 from the Capital Cultural Fund, should the Berlin budget make a
positive development at the same time.
‘Pending further necessary decisions, we are extremely glad that the Berlin Senate
wishes to support the HAU Hebbel am Ufer and the festival Tanz im August with a
clear subsidy. From now on Tanz im August will receive a long-awaited and
structurally necessary improvement in its financial basis from two sides. This enables
us to strengthen and further develop Berlin as one of the most important dance
centres in Europe,’ said Vanackere on Wednesday morning at the opening press
conference of Tanz im August 2015.
Artists introduced
In the foyer of HAU1, dance legend Lucinda Childs and the Philippine choreographer Eisa
Jocson, in conversation with Virve Sutinen, artistic director of Tanz im August, report today
on their current preparations in the Berliner Festspielhaus and the Sophiensaele. The art
collector Axel Haubrok talks with the artist Andreas Slominski about recent stage
experiences and new perspectives while setting up their exhibition in the theatre space of
HAU1. And at the Akademie der Künste on Hanseatenweg, Rosemary Butcher gives a first
impression of her multi-part retrospective.
Virve Sutinen, artistic director of Tanz im August: ‘This year the programme has been
inspired by artists who continually achieve outstanding work. We are delighted that
the festival is now beginning, and extend a warm welcome to all our visitors.’
The 27th International Festival will open tomorrow, 13 August, with three productions at HAU
Hebbel am Ufer, the Berliner Festspielhaus and a kick-off party in the festival centre WAU. A
total of 18 productions and a retrospective, around 60 performances with stars and
newcomers of contemporary dance from over 20 countries will be seen at 8 venues
throughout Berlin.
Tickets are still available for most productions, and a few tickets for the three Childs
performances in the Haus der Berliner Festspiele are still available online or at the box
office.
Opening week from Thursday
On the opening weekend HAU1 will be the venue for two experimental artistic formats with
the stage premiere of the Haubrok Collection and 24h-DURCHEINANDER, by
deufert&plischke. The European premiere of the revival of Available Light, the collaboration
between Lucinda Childs, John Adams and Frank O. Gehry, can be seen over three
consecutive evenings, co-produced with the Sommerfestival Kampnagel, Hamburg, and
others.
Rosemary Butcher, to whom Tanz im August is devoting a retrospective, appears at the
festival for the first time with four works and an exhibition of her archive project Memory in
the Present Tense. The video-installation Secrets of the Open Sea, created in 2014, and the
performance The Test Pieces circle like the exhibition around the question of memory and its
relationship to the present and future.
Elina Pirinen calls her Personal Symphonic Moment an ‘autopsy’ of Shostakovich’s
Leningrad Symphony. This anti-fascist and anti-authoritarian composition, which is heard in
full length, accompanies the dancers’ impulsive and bizarre expressionist dance in the
inhospitable gleam of the stage lighting.
The Philippine choreographer Eisa Jocson, one of a total of eight positions from Asia at this
year’s festival, is a specialist in deconstructing culturally coded movement clichés. In her
new solo, Host, she likewise turns her body into the venue for a play of signs, appropriating
the movements of geisha hostesses, transsexuals and pop stars in order to recombine and
transform them.
Outlook, second and third festival weeks
The Canadian dancer and choreographer Marie Chouinard has been touring worldwide with
her company for 25 years. Her sculpturally and sexually charged spectacles are legendary.
The Compagnie Marie Chouinard can now be experienced at Tanz im August in two pieces
that were enthusiastically received by the audience at their premiere in Stuttgart: the visually
stunning literary adaptation HENRI MICHAUX : MOUVEMENTS and Chouinard’s most recent
work, Soft virtuosity, still humid, on the edge.
Compagnie Marie Chouinard: Wednesday 19.8 and Thursday 20.8, both 8 p.m. in the Haus der
Berliner Festspiele.
In his numbered series of formal strict abstractions, Tao Ye has composed repetitive,
demanding sequences of movement between flexible lightness and martial rigour. In 6 and 7
the bodies, clothed in wide blue-black skirts or narrow white tube dresses, take on a
sculptural quality without giving rise to concrete associations
TAO Dance Theatre: Wednesday 26.8 at 8 p.m. and Thursday 27.8 at 9 p.m. in the Haus der
Berliner Festspiele.
Participatory form ats
The audience is also invited to take part in a series of participatory events and discussion
rounds: Physical Introductions, Dance Circles and Meeting of Minds are offered as open
audience formats, together with the new Meet the Artist.
Venues 2015
Akademie der Künste (Hanseatenweg), HAU Hebbel am Ufer (HAU1 and HAU3), Haus der
Berliner Festspiele, RadialsystemV, Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, Volksbühne am RosaLuxemburg-Platz, Sophiensaele.
Tickets and accreditation
The comprehensive programme, visual material and complete press folder can be obtained
online at www.tanzimaugust.de
Tickets and further information are availble as of now – at www.tanzimaugust.de or at the
HAU Hebbel am Ufer box office (temporarily at HAU1 due to renovations):
Stresemannstraße 29, 10963 Berlin
Daily 12 a.m. to 7 p.m.
On days without performances 3 to 7 p.m.
Closed on Sundays and public holidays
Tel. +49 (0)30.259004 -27
Press contact
Hendrik von Boxberg
Tanz im August
T + 49 30 58901296
M + 49 177 7379207
[email protected], [email protected]
www.tanzimaugust.de
Tanz im August is a festival of HAU Hebbel am Ufer. With the support of the governing mayor
of Berlin – State Chancellory – Cultural Affairs. Funded with means provided by the Capital
Cultural Fund. With the kind support of the Aventis Foundation.