Art stations fundation - by Grażyna Kulczyk

Presence and absence, exhibiting and performing, subject and object: stagings by Ben J. Riepe deal with work on the fringes of the fleeting. This aesthetic questioning forms the framework for numerous stage pieces, performances as well as for video and film works that have been shown nationally and internationally. Answering to the idiom of this year’s MALTA Festival, Riepe deploys an ephemeral space of perception for the senses with his “Choreographic dinner”.

Over the course of two festival evenings, the Düsseldorf-based choreographer and his seven piece ensemble of dancers serve dinner to the audience. Together, they want to discuss red-hot topics, artistic questions and experiences that are taken in by the senses. The common table becomes a stage opening new fields of action for the company as a displacement between art and congregation, aesthetics and participation, space and community. The staging affects guests directly, leading them into a cosmos of smells, food, sounds, movement and all sorts of sensual and aesthetic spaces of experience. Within this, there lies not only a focus on current imminent topics, but also and at the same time on central questions concerning the ephemeral principle of a choreography of spaces as well as on hosting culture. In this collective project, the company creates a space for artistic participation, offering every guest a very direct experience.

At the heart of the spectacle “Choreographic dinner” by Ben J. Riepe is supper for specatotors, prepared by TOP CHEF Tomasz Purol.