The chin sits on the knee; the fingers are becoming entangled in the toes. The fingers lift one foot in the air after another. The folded woman is unsteady and her bottom is swaying over the stage. Next to her, a similar creature tries as much as it can to reproduce the same movement. They roll on their backs, they sometimes shove one another and they climb on each other.

In the dance performance “Headwalker”, a fantasy world is created thanks to an interaction of music, movement, dance and technical contacts specifically adapted to modelling clay. This word has its own period of time, its own sounds and its own form.  The actions continuously dissolve themselves in order to create a musical and colourful whirl. There is always something happening, but the tempo overpowers nothing…

“Headwalker” is a mix between dance movements, pictures and music, all of it being in the perspective of discovery and pleasure. At the end of the play, the audience is invited to come on stage and play as they wish with the modelling clay!

The premiere of “Headwalker” took place on 26 September 2010 at tanzhaus nrw in Düsseldorf.

TEAM

Choreography/artistic direction: Barbara Fuchs
Dance: Odile Foehl, Emily Welther
Music, sound: Jörg Ritzenhoff
Live Sound: Barbara Fuchs
Photos: MEYERORIGINALS & Barbara Fuchs
Costumes: Cindy Karkkonen, Barbara Fuchs
Stage Design: Barbara Fuchs

Photo: Anke Schwarzer / Barbara Fuchs

A production by tanzfuchs PRODUKTION/Barbara Fuchs and tanzhaus nrw in the frame of Take-off: Junger Tanz. Tanzplan Düsseldorf, supported by Tanzplan Germany, an initiative by the Federal Cultural Foundation and the City of Düsseldorf, the Prime Minister of North Rhine Westphalia and the Arts Foundation NRW.

Press quotes:

Headwalkers are alive – The Festival MOVE! wants to interest the young audience to contemporary dance. Yesterday, at Fabrik Heeder it worked out very well. (Westdeutsche Zeitung, 14.11.2012)

Can you make dance theatre for children aged three years? Yes, this can work, and in such a good way that even the adults are amazed. Choreographer Barbara Fuchs brings “headwalkers” on stage. At these first human images, drawn by children, the feet are placed at the head, the body seems to forget. This shows the child’s perception of what is really important, and also reflects the movement repertoire at this age.

Barbara Fuchs and her dancers Odile Foehl and Emily Welther show this condition in the Wachsfabrik, through the development of movements, in which hands and feet are always in dialogue with each other. The head remains in the centre with his facial expressions, and the body gets those cumbersome, as children still have. Brilliant anyone here has embarked on the perception and the reality of the people at the beginning of his life.

This type of dance language gets by without sentimentality and cuteness, and yet its take children as adults. Always in the flow of movements to solve the actions on each other, something always happens, but not overwhelmed by the pace, but stimulate – as well as the subtle sound composition by Jörg Ritzenhoff – a concentrated look. That not only people but also objects legs can be made, the choreography demonstrated in sensual play with balls of dough. This is dance for beautiful feet and clever brains. (Thomas Linden, Kölnische Rundschau)

In the best moments it is a single whirl of color and music … A piece of stimulating the fantasy, about the fact, that the shapes and colors of the childrens world have to create themselves – directly and metaphorically. (Dorothea Marcus, aKT 16, Oktober 2010)