What the Body Remembers.
Dance Heritage Today

Zwei Giraffen tanzen Tango – Bremer Schritte by Gerhard Bohner and Helge Letonja,
steptext dance project, Theater Bremen. Photo © M. Menke

A retrospective view of 20th century modern dance shows how new images of the body, choreographic concepts and perception levels have evolved since the beginning of the century, while moving away from classic ballet and other movement traditions. These changes stand for emancipation, for a liberation from gender roles and body images, for the dynamics of new utopian beginnings and political assimilation, but also for resistance. Dancers, such as Isadora Duncan, Mary Wigman, Gret Palucca, Jean Weidt and Valeska Gert, have not only revolutionised dance as an art form, but have fundamentally inspired the other arts and have raised questions about the political dimensions of dance. A similar situation developed with the new departures of post-war Modernism, including dance theatre in Germany, Butoh in Japan, Modern and Postmodern dance in the USA or contemporary dance in France and Belgium.

The programme focuses on questions concerned with passing on knowledge of choreography and dance between generations, and accordingly, also on building up a repertoire of contemporary dance. Possibilities surrounding reconstructions of historical works and their physical and performative transformations will also be explored. Which methods are used to translate historical material from the archives into present-day dance, and which appropriations and enhancements are practised? How does this material and performance relate to one another? The archives will be viewed as a place of creative process for historical as well as contemporary dance.

An extensive installation, Das Jahrhundert des Tanzes (The Century of Dance), brings together materials from German dance archives and international performances. A programme series of more than 20 current dance productions focuses on the exemplary dance heritage of Isadora Duncan, Mary Wigman and Valeska Gert through to Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Xavier Le Roy using dance as a contemporary art form. A “campus” is set up to guide international students through the subjects of choreographic movement and body research. A discursive special event programme reflects on societal and politico-cultural meanings of dance and choreographic heritage, situating them in the context of postcolonial and historical-theoretical debates. A film series and a reader on “The Century of Dance” complete this diverse programme.

From 24 August to 21 September 2019, the Akademie der Künste on Hanseatenweg is set to become a research platform of dance heritage.

Thomas Florschuetz.
Zwischenzeit

Thomas Florschuetz. Ohne Titel (Palast) 39, 2006. Photo © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2019

Since his work began, photographer Thomas Florschuetz has dedicated himself to the fragmentary image of the snapshot, which oscillates between abstraction and concretion. While he has been creating unique photographic tableaux of parts of the body since the mid-1980s, numerous groups of works have followed to the present day. These show various subjects, including from architecture, engineering and botany, and essentially differ in their material and surface texture as well as in the handling of colour, light and shade. Overlays of different surfaces (plastic, glass, wood, stone, etc.) transport the two-dimensional medium of photography to new spatial constellations.

From these images, often in multi-part form, works are created that emphasise the fragmentary glance, making difference and loss tangible at the same moment in the transition from seeing to showing. For the photographer, this process is not about the physicality in the image but rather the viewer's perception of the body shown.

A selection of large and small-format works at the Kurt Tucholsky Literaturmuseum at Rheinsberg Palace demonstrate how deep and multi-layered his photography can be and the limits of abstraction he exceeds.

Poetik der Mitte: Walter Kempowski

Walter Kempowski. Photo © Renate von Mangoldt 1972

In cooperation with Georg-August-Universität Göttingen

A showcase presentation will offer insights into the Akademie der Künste's Kempowski Archive.

Further information will follow shortly.

Magic Media – Media Magic.
Video Art since the 1970s from the Wulf-Herzogenrath-Archive

Ulrike Rosenbach, from the Aphrodite TV series, 1975, 45 black-and-white photographs, 24 x 30 cm each, private collection. © Ulrike Rosenbach © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2019

Wulf Herzogenrath decisively contributed as curator since the 1970s to the establishment of video art in Germany. His archive, which is privately owned and in the archives of the Academy of Arts, includes highlights of video art and video sculpture since the 1960s by Nam June Paik and others, as well as documents, documents, sketches, photographs and his legendary artist guest books. These books have accompanied the artistic production and thus the history of video art until day.

The Wulf-Herzogenrath-Archive was first presented at the Akademie der Künste as part of the "Videoart at Midnight" festival in 2018. The exhibition "Magic Media - Media Magic" in the autumn of 2019 now provides unique insights into the curator's private archive on the development of video art with photos, letters, drafts by Vito Acconci, Klaus vom Bruch, John Cage, Joan Jonas, Rebecca Horn, Nam June Paik, Bjørn Melhus, Marcel Odenbach, Sigmar Polke, Ulrike Rosenbach, Bill Viola.

KONTAKTE ’19.
Biennial for Electroacoustic Music and Sound Art

Strotter Inst live Bamberg, photo: Marian Lenhard

The third edition of the KONTAKTE festival examines performative opportunities in electro-acoustic music. On the one hand, it explores instrumental physical qualities of making music with modular synthesizers, record players, etc. and, on the other hand, forms of musical practice that open up for the performative in other ways.

The historical backdrop is Feedback Studio in Cologne, founded in 1970 by Johannes Fritsch whose legacy is held in the music archive of the Akademie der Künste, Rolf Geelhaar and David Johnson. The Feedback group was one of the most outstanding initiatives to emerge from the international centre of gravity that was Cologne in the late 1970s, and was distinguished by its search for new forms of self-organisation and diversification of intellectual interests against the backdrop of an increasingly globalised, complex and pluralistic world.

This is contrasted by current productions, such as the third part of the music theatre trilogy Stadt Land Fluss by Daniel Kötter and Hannes Seidl, a concert project from the sphere of the College of Music Shanghai, as well as the T.I.T.O. turntable marathon curated by Ignaz Schick, which will close KONTAKTE '19 on 29 September, the day of the Berlin Marathon.