Niemandszeit

Choreography as social practice

In 1998 Thomas Plischke graduated from PARTS with a dance solo, and Kattrin Deufert graduated from the Freie Universität Berlin with a text. Since then they have lectured as deufert&plischke at colleges, including PARTS, and supervised many students during their graduate projects. For Niemandszeit they reverse the roles: they gave their graduate projects to their students, not to have them reconstructed, but so as to become students of their own work, with their students as mentors and themselves as performers.

The students reformulated the solo and text with personal experiences and memories from the years 1998-2014, a tumultuous period in which the Iraq war, 9/11, the financial crisis, the Arab Spring, Facebook, Google and the American National Security Agency dominated the headlines. The students wrote a new solo and a new text that is now being performed by deufert&plischke, together with the audience.

This all fits within the artistic strategy of deufert&plischke: they erase the artistic ego and have their work written collectively. Choreography thus becomes a social activity, not determined by aesthetic principles, but by existential and philosophical concepts such as war and peace, freedom and truth.

• The work of deufert&plischke can be seen in theatres, museums and other places. In 2010 we showed a dance performance from their Anarchiv series in the Kaaistudios.

#edgydance #diy