Art stations fundation - by Grażyna Kulczyk

Isabelle Schad’s new work addresses the topics of collectivity and resistance, investigating the possible relationships between freedom and form with a group of 22 dancers. Can the creation of an infinite, unified, monstrous body possibly become a site of resistance?

(Upon reading Hannah Arendt : On Revolution) 

’The group’s body is made out of many. We exercise practices that have the potential to unite instead of individualize.  We understand these practices as a relationship to oneself and to one another, as a pathway. These practices are biological ones, cellular ones, energetic ones.

We look at freedom in relation to form: to form that is made of and found by an inner process and its rhythms. Rhythm creates the form. Therefore, there is multitude, multiplicity, subjectivity, and variation : variation within repetition. We look at freedom as the essence of happiness. We experience happiness when the flow of movement can be done together and be maintained.  We look at freedom that is guaranteed once everyone within a group can find form in a subjective way. Therefore, there is a specific relation to the term equality: Everyone can be equal, once subjectivity in one‘s own respective rhythm is guaranteed within the form.

We look for equality in movement and for the end of hierarchy between body parts. Relations between body parts are like relations between people within the group. We play and distort in any kind of way. We differentiate synchronicity from synchronization. We understand synchronicity as the moment when things fall together in time, a phenomenon of energy. We borrow floor, formation, and holding patterns from other communally practiced forms, such as folk dance or Eastern body practices. We relate resistance to questions of rhythm. We relate protest to questions of organization and exercise. We look at the esthetics of representation and the kind we are trying to resist. We look at the esthetics of representation as a political practice. Could the creation of an infinite, unified, monstrous body possibly become a site of resistance? Could the body itself become a site of resistance, the body of a dancer ?’

(I.Schad)

Dancer and Choreographer Isabelle Schad studied classical dance in Stuttgart and worked with many choreographers until she started developing her own projects from 1999 on. Her research focuses on the body and its materiality, the body as process, place and space, the relationship between body, choreography, (re)presentation, form and experience, body practice as site for learning processes, community and political involvement. Her projects work at the interface of dance, performance and visual arts being featured internationally (world wide collaborations with local Goethe Institutes, international festivals, German Dance Platforms etc). She co-founded several projects/open collectives (Good Work, Praticable), that search for ways of linking different practices and researches whilst questioning the modes of production. She teaches all over the world and in different formats. She is co-organizer of the working space „Wiesenburg-Halle“ in Berlin and since this year also Zen Shiatsu Practitioner.