Realisation: 2018
Concept, movement, sound: Gisela Müller, Gebrüder Teichmann
Dramaturgical consulting: Jacopo Lanteri
Light design: Martin Pilz
Production: Tanzfabrik Berlin
Coproduction: Nomad Dance Academy Slovenia
Supported by: The Creative Europe program as part of DANCE ON, PASS ON, DREAM ON
This exciting period of an aesthetic and pedagogical revolution in dance, which coincided with the exceptionally inspiring European dance productions of the 1980s, shaped the choreographer Gisela Müller, who is returning to the stage after two decades of teaching.
She studied dance in Paris, graduated from the School for the New Dance Development in Amsterdam, and spent an extended period in the late 1980s at various dance studios and educational programs in New York. She danced with numerous dance companies in both the U.S. and Europe, and in 1992 she founded her own group, The Move Company, and created a series of choreographies. Between 2006 and 2010, Gisela Müller was a visiting professor at the Cross-University Dance Program at HZT Berlin, where she developed and led the undergraduate program in Contemporary Dance, its contextualization, and choreography. She is also a member of the decision-making body of the Balkan dance network Nomad Dance Academy.
It was only a matter of time before Gisela Müller decided to resume her choreographic work, even though the performance “Me again, but not alone” does not give the impression that her artistic work was ever interrupted, but rather that it is the result of a rather long and thorough exploration of the potent intersections of dance, radio, and sound art. She invited Andi and Hannes Teichmann (Gebrüder Teichmann), electronic musicians, DJs, and activists in Berlin’s techno underground and culture, who swear by the motto “Do it yourself!” (Do it yourself!), to collaborate on the project.
The creators base the performance on how these media use space, on the material resources of the movements characteristic of them (sound and body), what specific locations in physical space mean to them, and how their complementarity can be conceived. The use of space and the body allows them to first mark the locations of materials using various technologies and then gradually transform them into an artistic object in which choreographic and sound media are no longer distinguishable. In this way, the performance Me Again, But Not Alone extends beyond composition into the realm of interdisciplinary artistic construction.
Artist and theorist Anna Friz understands radio subjectivity as partial, conditioned by reverberation, and realized in the aggregate of the body and electronics. Recording and broadcasting technologies make it possible to hear voices far from their point of origin, yet they should not be thought of as separate from their bodily sources. The transmission of sound offers insight into the immanence of the imprint, the uniqueness, and the irreplaceability created by a specific body. The title of the performance, “Me Again, But Not Alone,” can also be understood as being articulated by a personified choreography that gazes anew at the data of the transmitter: the soundscape. The mobility of the radio or sound body can be equally informative for the performance’s composer. In short, the performance offers us a unique insight into the various ways of listening to the image (the moving body on stage) and watching the sound (which the sound artists create and process), and in a specific way liberates our instrument of reception.