In the expedition “BELOW ZERO”, the audience will be taken through an iced up world full of space, sound and images. The team in charge of this research journey plays around the third state of water with associative microcostumes and macrocostumes. How will the medially pressed components of a polar expedition be closely listened to and looked at under a dissecting glass? They will be “zoomed in”, cut, dismantled, distorted, mirrored and isolated from their contexts.

“gaunt and exhausted faces with ice-encrusted beards peered from snow covered clothes. (…) to what our eyes can see, nothing apart snowfields (…) the entire surface of the ocean was covered by a sizzling mass of ice and foam (…) ice moving around (…) the still was overpowering, we were in a dead, iced up world.” (from South with Endurance by Frank Hurley)

BELOW ZERO is an ensemble production by tanzfuchs PRODUKTION and was premiered on 25. November 2011 at Barnes Crossing in the Wachsfabrik.

 

TEAM

Director, Stage: Barbara Fuchs  Sound: Jörg Ritzenhoff
Performer: Kazue Ikeda, Odile Foehl
Lightdesign: Wolfgang Pütz
Voice: Gisela Nohl 

Photo: MEYER ORIGINALS

Pressquotes:

StadtRevue | Tipp

” In research on the project concerning snow and ice, the choreograph Barbara Fuchs began to get interested in Ernest Shackleton who travelled to the South Pole in 1914 together with the bark “Endurance”. Her new piece is called “Below Zero”. Out of historical documented knobs it folds moments and subjects. Narrow and wide: The groups were camping in tents, little houses, below boats and were travelling through endless landscapes. The slipping and sliding. Storms. Frostbiting. Corporeal. “The vicious and the incredible beauty”, so says Fuchs. Odile Foehl and Kazue Ikeda are dancing. Thereto the clanking sound world of composer Jörg Ritzenhoff. “

Klaus Keil, aKT 12 + Choices, Kultur in NRW

Cold shock

[…] In the corner of the great hall it is as the two dancers Odile Foehl and Kazue Ikeda would stick in a crevasse on confined space. The movement-actions are designed for mediating moments of reality but also catching the atmosphere of those moments. In a solo Odile Foehl bends her extremities as if she would want to invade in her own body to defy the cold. Then the dancers trudge through flour and leave behind white footsteps on the stage: Footsteps in the snow. Marine ropes and sailor’s kitbags fly on the stage from the off. Frozen garments are crackling and cracking spreaded and cold and stiff attracted. Thousands of polystyrene chips simulate a snowscape. […]

Thomas Linden, Kölnische Rundschau, 30.11.11

[…] A small room filled with far too many people. Shouts and shots resound from the outside. Then a door opens and the only thing to see is a flawless opaque whiteness. Fog which nearly takes the whole visibility. Two shapes break away from the smoky cotton wool, obviously freezing with chattering teeth …

A sensational beginning: shivering, eerie and with a little bit ironically the staging begins… Solitude and silence, two states which may touch us humans very deeply, are just there when these extreme circumstances of the ice desert are put into pictures or words… Thereto Jörg Ritzenhoff produces an atmospheric sound carpet […]