Invitation
Rachel Brooker: concept / choreography
Invitation is an interactive dance work which opens with the words: “This is an invitation to touch anywhere on exposed skin. You are free to touch, or not to touch. Please enter the space". Dancers arrange and rearrange themselves, offering and withdrawing parts of the body as they compose their invitations to the audience. In the words of reviewer Adam Bliss, “As I moved about the installation, I was struck by the tenderness and intense concentration shared by dancers and touchers alike”.
The piece was inspired by the following quote:Things wabi-sabi are usually small and compact, quiet and inward-oriented. They beckon: get close, touch, relate. They inspire a reduction of the psychic distance between one thing and another thing; between people and things.Leonard Koren, Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets and Philosophers
Choreographer Rachel Brooker read these words in the Tate Modern café. An image formed- dancers transformed into objects, offered to the audience to be touched, known, experienced. A reduction of the distance between things. Through a season-long rehearsal process and repeated performances the idea has developed and matured into Invitation, a unique and memorable performative proposition.
concept/choreography: Rachel Brooker
Music: Laura Mello
Dance: Rachel Brooker | Claudia Ginsberg | Nahid Matin Pour | Christine Mauch | Laura Mello | James Neirinck | Maria Pyatkova | Laura Weiss
Video: Kosei Takasaki
Choreographer/Director:
Rachel Brooker studied Dance and Biology at Swarthmore College and has been dancing and choreographing professionally for nine years. She directs Anima Dance, a modern dance company based in Berlin. In addition to her international choreography and teaching credits, she has performed with Marc Bogaerts, Sabine Dahrendorf, Jenny Haack, Dai Jian and Felix Ruckert, among others. She has lived and worked in Berlin since 2006.
Video:
Kosei Takasaki, is a filmmaker, journalist, and visual artist based in Berlin, Germany and Tokyo, Japan. He is known for his full and rich imaginary and exceptional creations. Since 1999 he’s dedicated to filming, live video installations and also different visual projects in theaters, festivals and clubs worldwide. One could see his performances at the MELT! Festival 2004-2007, the c/o Pop, the International Videofestival Bochum, the International Exhibition for Design in Cologne and the Csides Festival in Jerusalem, Israel, the music festival Tokyo Collaboration and at the LUX2006 "Meeting for Visual Arts" in Sevilla and also several film competitions and festivals. In 2007 he ran a workshop in cooperation with the Academy for Arts and Design Halle researching the concept of “cinematic painting” and the synergy of dance and video. In 2006 Takasaki founded his video label for visual arts, kokomono, and is since then building up a creative and vivid visual network.
Music/Sound:
Laura Mello was born in Blumenau, Brazil. She tudied piano, viola, composition in Brazil and electroacoustic music at the University for Music and Performing Arts in Vienna. Mello writes and performs music for and in theater, dance, multimedia performance and sound art in Brazil, Austria and Germany. In 2005 she won the Theodor Körner Prize, and in 2007 founded the artists´collective KosmetiKRadio. She lives in Berlin where she is writing her PhD about cooperation between artists and software programmers in dance performances. Her work has been seen in Brazil, Europe and the USA.
