Little language | 15/10 Euro
OCTOBER 19 | Audio description for blind and visually impaired people
In “Shortcuts to Familiar Places”, James Batchelor creates a personal performance about the body as a site of historical and choreographic inscription.
Like a map that is constantly being redrawn and rewritten, the body here goes through endless cycles of transmission and reception. What are the gestures, forms and patterns that persist over time?
James Batchelor’s dance teacher Ruth Osborne was trained in the methods of modern dance pioneer Gertrud Bodenwieser, who developed visionary approaches to dance education and choreography in the early-mid-20th century. Bodenwieser’s repertory and training were rarely documented in video and hence now mostly survive in the body memories of her students. James Batchelor explores the fragments of movement that still linger from this time in body memory, existing in tension with a seemingly oppositional pull towards the obsessively detailed anatomical deconstruction. In a solo and two duets, he finds new artistic ways to embrace the complexity of self-expression in contemporary times – while echoing the free spirit of the expressive dance (Ausdruckstanz) era.
