What would it look like for us to shed our stories visually with the elegance of a couture gown and the abstraction of a exploding kinetic body sculpture?

This dream of fusing letters and bodies began over 10 years ago when my commercial graphic design work no longer fulfilled my restless creative voice. This project has been a passport leading me from my hometown New York to its first initial models in southern Spain, studying the Carnival culture of the Caribbean island of Trinidad with Peter Minshall, making jewelry in Dubai, to exhibits in London and Bali. This has always been a long term project that I imagined will take a lifetime, yet sometimes dreams come true sooner then expected. This process of finding solutions is an experimental workshop in learning and exploring possibilities of fusing storytelling, body movement, sculpture and performance. Trying such uncharted unique experiments can be quite risky since there are few points of comparison, yet from extensive research into kinetic sculpture, deconstructed laser fashion, mechanical engineering, and performance art a foundation has started to form.

A residency at the MADE space in Berlin, has made it possible to test these initial ideas with an army of collaborators, from bondage designers to choreographers, mc.s to journalists, all working together to create this visual narrative experience. This performance work is an ongoing work- shop that is more like the latest evolution of an elaborate experiment than having a finite ending performance.



Act 1: UNKNOWN ERROR
Text: Tita von Hardenberg. Dancer: Jenny Buka. Music: Walera Goodman, Stefanie Wüst.

How does the daily inner dialogue between us and our technology sound? How much multi- tasking is our brain still capable of, while it‘s tilling through the information jungle of the internet at the speed of lightning? Does our computer already know more about us than we do ourselves? Tita von Hardenberg teams up with the Apple to explore this question as it de- constructs itself as the cyber-siren in dia- logue with the opera singer Stefanie Wüst. Throughout all that only one thing becomes crystal clear: in the frantic escape from unknown errors, the shift key doesn‘t help in real life either. Nothing is more difficult than simply pulling the plug.





Act 2: THE WORD IS FLESH
Text: Talib Kweli. Dancer: Kirikoo aka Brice Torres. Music: Crada.

This story is about the power of words as weapons for positive and negative actions and reactions. The rhythmic flow of the text becomes an instrument in perfect harmony between expressive delivery and clarity of conceptual thought. This piece of word-smithing was created specifically for this performance during Talib Kweli’s short visit to Berlin. The lyrics were inspired by conversations with the project participants and were recorded with surgical precision in a matter of hours. The piece is also an acknowledgment of all those who remain voiceless, unable to break through the restrictions of urban survival in Brooklyn (New York) and cities across the world.





Act 3: GREEN DELUSION
Text: Forough Farrokhzad. Dancer: Maryam Nikandish. Music: Parvin Namazi, M. Ramzani, S. Moghaddam.

With the release of her first volume of poetry in 1955, the Iranian poet, feminist, and film- maker Forough Farrokhzad launched severe discussions in Iran and is known to be one of the most important artists of her country. She became an idol in 1967, caused by her early death in a car accident at age of 32. The artist‘s work is a thorn the side of the Islamic Republic of Iran today. For the sculpture ”Stripe“, the Iranian singer Parvin Namazi and her collective selected three excerpts from Farrohkzad‘s poems. They are meant to reflect the green movement‘s mood of 2009: heavy-hearted to brave and hopeful. A mood, that stands for a whole generation. Ebon Heath dedicates this piece to his deceased friend Nader Ebrahimi and the victims who lost their lives at the demonstrations and in the prisons in Iran.





Act 4: BERLIN IS NOT A PIECE OF BREAD
Text: Max Herre and Kevin Rittberger. Dancer: Laura Siegmund. Music: M. Herre, S. Kawamura, R. DiGioia.

Max Herre and Kevin Rittberger paint a verbal pic- ture of Berlin from its past as the cultural epicenter of the 1920s to its current re- awakening as a creative playground for a new generation of artists from around the world. Take a tour through the city’s dif- ferent districts from Einstein’s dentist on Kottbusser Tor, gentrification in Prenzlauer Berg, hipsters, artists, and anarchists on every other corner while a Turkish pop song blasts from a passing car. Josef Beuys to Bugs Bunny and doners to beer, this evolving city stuck be- tween the burdens of war and glories of creativity past and present, has become home to a new chapter of diversity from Germany and the world.

MADE FILM ABOUT THE TYPOGRAPHIC BALLET from MADE Blog on Vimeo.

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