Barbara Fuchs follows Virilio’s thesis and translates them into dance. She asks: what happens when bodies are perpetually in motion? Does the addition of all possible movements produce a freezing point, just like the sum of all audible frequencies produces a voiceless sound?
Four dancers and the composer/live electronic technician Jörg Ritzenhoff explore chaos, the constant movement of the body and the sounds. Their research gives the ability to experience simultaneity as well as the tension which is included in motionless pauses. They no longer look for content but they are themselves the content of the performance. Their “on top of each other”-selves, their penetration and their isolation design a fugitive choreography. The performance literally roars through the audience.
The premiere of “White noise” took place on 11 Feburary 2009 at Barnes Crossing, Cologne.
TEAM
Choreography, Stage, Light: Barbara Fuchs
Live-Electronic: Jörg Ritzenhoff
Choreography, Dance: Erika Winkler, Odile Foehl, Jenifer Hoernemann, Barbara Fuchs
Photo: Wolfgang Weimer
Supported by Kulturamt of the City Cologne, Ministerpräsidenten of Landes NRW, der SK Stiftung Kultur and coproduced by Choreographer-Network BARNES CROSSING.
Press-Quotes
Dorothea Marcus, akt. 02.04.2009
[…] In “The white noise“, a piece by Barbara Fuchs, which constitutes a “walkable dance sculpture”, the spectators are placed on chairs in the middle of the stage. The light goes out; a babble of voices soars from Dictaphones which are installed on the walls. Four dancers, who are dressed all in black, are winding through chair-isles, contorting themselves through spectator’s feet and narrow stools. The electronic tangle arises to a boom, to a stamping engine and mechanical sound of the sea. Nature or machine? Again and again both blurs throughout the 40 minutes. Meanwhile the electronic-musician Jörg Ritzenhoff, who is live in attendance, drafts stark and sublime sound-worlds. The dancers mutually infuse their bodies, climb on the others in pairs of two, take themselves in possession for a few seconds – you have rarely seen such exciting motion inventions. On a high dancing level they chase through the room, every dancer has several soli. Finally they lead, drag, bully the spectators from their chairs; they marginalize them to the edge of the stage and dispose their bags and jackets. In the end, one of the dancers lies between the reversed chair legs that look like spikes of a sea urchin or like a black reed field. […]
Hans-Christoph Zimmermann, Bonner General Anzeiger – 19th of May 2009
Convincing performances at dance-festival in Bonn
Gudrun Lange, Samir Akika and Barbara Fuchs at “Beueler Brotfabrik”
by Hans-Christoph Zimmermann
…
The 45-minutes dance night of Barbara Fuchs “The white noise” finished the stand row “Bonner Gastspielreihe” in the theatre at the ballroom in Bonn. 35 spectators are sitting on stools on the white dance-carpet. Four dancers are winding through them and the chair-legs, measuring distances with their spreaded arms and legs and appraising close- and far-relations. While the powerful sound-music of Jörg Ritzenhoff is playing, the four dancers are working their way to the vertical direction.
Intertwined, they grow to laokoonesk figures, roaming through the arms of the immobilized spectators and – by this – overcharging their cognitive abilities. Before them, on the side, behind them – everywhere new impressions are lurking which constantly demand new decisions of perception and adaptive responsiveness. Finally the spectators are conducted to the edge of the stage and now see the occurrence from their accustomed manner. A choreography which captivates by its sensual presence and density.
Nicole Strecker, Barnes Crossing: two premiers at Wachsfabrik
[…] It is the concern of Barbara Fuchs to show our primal fear of missing something, this demanding simultaneity of events. She does not serve this feeling with a flat and overflowed dramaturgy but analyses it in an abstract. The composer Ritzenhoff, live in attendance, mixes the sounds of our stressful society in a sublime manner – wind turbines, jabbering TV, highway noise -, whereas the choreography connotes mainly the malaise of the own body: The dancers shake their hands as if they would want to chip off a sticky mass. Then a shiver runs through them as if they would suffer from a continuous goose bumps attack. Particularly impressive are the rangy-angular impulses of Erika Winkler in this successful first ensemble work by Barbara Fuchs who got her aesthetical pendant in the second part of the evening: “Mrs. K.” represented by Suna Göncü. […]