The 3 G rule applies, visits only possible with proof - recovered, vaccinated or tested.
Blank Check festival presents a new generation of movement and choreography artists in their Berlin debut; a melting pot of individual pasts and presents. The festival is a space to reveal and share the recent works of nein9 kollektiv, their collaborators and invited guests. Forming a curatorial collage, with each evening celebrating and providing insights into radically different approaches to the performance arts. The first night foregrounds body and perception. The second addresses tension: grasp and release, loss and power. The third ponders balance and disharmony, through the works of invited guests. The fourth and final night, communion.
festival-program:
Thursday, 10th March 2022, 7pm
Azathoth | Omer Keinan (30 min)
break
Under-discussed | Ariel Hayun (10 min)
womb | César B., Susanna Ylikoski, Ariel Hayun (10 min)
Schritt (Instep) | Lena Klink (15 min)
Friday, 11th March 2022, 7pm
weed | Rotem Weissman (18 min)
Eolian | Ruby Frances Jones (12 min)
break
The New Fire Ceremony | Omer Keinan (40 min)
Saturday, 12th March 2022, 7pm
Raum | William Cardoso (30 min)
break
Improvised Music Set |
Inbar Livne Bar-On, Maayan Franco, Roi Becker (15 min)
Azathoth (short-version) Omer Keinan (15 min)
Sunday, 13th March 2022, 7pm
HUABUN | Jihoon Choi, Jin Lee (15 min)
break
AGADA | Rotem Weissman (40 min)
The current, core members are:
Ariel Hayun, Jin Lee, Lena Klink, Máté Asbót, Omer Keinan, Raz Mantell, Rotem Weissman, Ruby Frances Jones, and Susanna Ylikoski.
Collaborators: César Ralleyguieb, Maayan Franco, Maria Pasadaki, Roi Becker
Guest Performers: Cheyenne Vallejo, William Cardoso
Photo: womb; by César B.
A production by 9nein kollektiv in cooperation with Acker Stadt Palast and DOCK ART.
Website: nein9kollektiv.de
detailed program
Thursday, 10th March 2022, 7pm
Azathoth – Omer Keinan
(World premiere)
Azathoth approaches cosmic-horror and existential-dread, drawing on the literary works of H.P. Lovecraft. The audience is invited into a meditation on hermeneutics, twisting and bending and disorienting, proliferating and prolonging the act of perception and interpretation. A play of meaning-making, transient and precarious. Savoring aporia, containing the existence of a reality beyond grasp, a tempest of beliefs and truths.
Devised as a postdramatic-experiment, the piece attempts to conceptualize an act of creation as chaotic and multiple. Seeking to manifest the disintegration of logic, the harrowing hounding for knowing the unknowable that is at the eye of cosmic horror - on the level of artmaking and performance.
Omer Keinan
with Máté Asbót, Raz Mantell, Susanna Ylikoski
and Roi Becker
Big thanks to Nitzan Cohen and Nava Zuckerman, and the many practitioners and friends who have taken part, over almost three years, in developing the methodologies at the heart of this process.
Under-discussed – Ariel Hayun
(Berlin premiere)
"For each of us as women, there is that dark place within where hidden and growing our true spirit rises”. (Audre Lorde)
Under-discussed is a solo created and performed by Ariel Hayun. As a celebration of the cyclical nature of life and death it is a call to make space for the intricately sensitive emotions beyond political and religious discussions about female bodies.
Score / Performance: Ariel Hayun
Music: Nasty Women by Valesuchi and Matias Aguayo.
The text in the track is taken from Ashley Judd’s speech Nasty Women (written by poet Nina Donovan) during Women’s March at Washington (January 2017).
womb – Susanna Ylikoski, Ariel Hayun, César B.
womb is a performance by the artists Susanna Ylikoski and Ariel Hayun in collaboration with the musician César B., that shares an auditive-image of the dancing body.
A microphone taped to the skin, captures sounds coming from inside the body of the dancers. Sounds that are normally hidden become audible, placing the dancers in a situation of exposure.
By making audible the points of emissions, trajectories, and durations of body movements, a prevalence of sound is created in the performance space, questioning how sound informs, affects, and transforms the perception of bodies. The synchronous act of sharing the movement and its sound creates a paradoxical world where we are both the observer and the observed: namely meeting with the impossibility to coincide with one another and oneself.
Sound and composition: César B.
Dance and choreography: Susanna Ylikoski and Ariel Hayun
Schritt (Instep) – Lena Klink
(Berlin premiere)
The solo Schritt combines march and polka dance with Lena’s body parts shifting movement research. Her choreographic works aim to lighten the interstice of contradictions in our everyday life. The movement research unfolds a physical get-together of the uneven and dis-matches of parts within a body and beyond. The political weighted marching dance and its appearance on stages in middle Europe provokes and engages simultaneously; Schritt scratches at the surface of the carnivalesque smile.
Credits:
Creation and performance: Lena Klink
Schritt is a developed version of the original, a part of Lena’s graduation work in SEAD Salzburg, 2020. Since then, her own movement research grew and took influence on this work. She could deepen her movement research, funded by Dis-Tanzen, NEUSTART KULTUR, Dachverband Tanz Deutschland and by the Commissions of the Federal Government for Culture and Media in 2021. Parts of this research found its inclusion into the creative process of Schritt.
Friday, 11th March 2022, 7pm
weed – Rotem Weissman
(Berlin premiere)
weed explores distortion of physical movement through the desire and love of the body to move. The audience is invited to question and bear witness to a surreal journey, and investigate the in-between moments of life and death.
weed emerges through themes of distorted, disconnected, and connected bodies, and concludes with a sense of absence and desolation. The dancers represent live presence, while the smashed body expresses the truth, the reality.
Choreography: Rotem Weissman
Co-Creation: Jin Lee
Performance and Vocals: Inbar Livne Bar
Thanks to Susan Quinn Eckart and Nada Choi
Eolian – Ruby Frances Jones
(Berlin premiere)
Grasp and release. What follows is a body, carried by wind, sacrificed to earth. This is a solo for my father.
Creation and performance: Ruby Frances Jones
The New Fire Ceremony – Omer Keinan
(Berlin premiere)
The ceremony is structured as a chain of competitions and deliberations.
The competitions take the form of improvised performances.
After each competition, the audience will cast a vote and choose their favorite.
The ceremony ends when only one competitor remains.
A brief discussion (in English) after the show will reframe the piece as a research in and through aesthetics as a function of the spectators’ phenomenology.
Omer Keinan
with Maria Pasadaki, Máté Asbót, and Susanna Ylikoski
Big thanks to Ariel Hayun, and Margareta Firinger, Sam Huczkowski, and Samuli Emery; Jelka Milic, Janyce Michellod, Milla Koistinen, Maja Poturovic, Douglas Bateman and Susan Quinn Eckart.
Originally developed for stage in collaboration with SEAD and performed at ARGEkultur Salzburg. Later adapted to an online performance in collaboration with Viral Festival (Israel), and premiered through Zoom in April 2020.
Saturday, 12th March 2022, 7pm
12th of March also at Acker Stadt Palast, siehe Link > ackerstadtpalast.de/agada-rotem-weissman-nein9-kollektiv
Raum – William Cardoso
(Berlin premiere)
“Sometimes I feel like throwing myself against a wall to externalize the mental pain and turn it into physical pain“.
Raum is a place of encounter with our demons, our fears and our forgiveness. It is a place of confrontation and a search for inner balance in order to move forward in peace.
This performance seeks to accept the darkness that sometimes dominates us, and to soften it by creating a space without judgment and without fear. Raum is a space of liberation
and to speak out, it is a stifled cry that we have that we have kept inside us for too long.
(Guest performance)
Choreography: William Cardoso
Performance: Cheyenne Vallejo & William Cardoso
Sound creation: Guillaume Jullien
Improvised Music Set (Improvised-Session)
(Guest performance)
Inbar Livne Bar-On (vocals), Maayan Franco (flute), Roi Becker (accordion)
Azathoth – Omer Keinan
(World premiere)
Azathoth approaches cosmic-horror and existential-dread, drawing on the literary works of H.P. Lovecraft. The audience is invited into a meditation on hermeneutics, twisting and bending and disorienting, proliferating and prolonging the act of perception and interpretation. A play of meaning-making, transient and precarious. Savoring aporia, containing the existence of a reality beyond grasp, a tempest of beliefs and truths.
Devised as a postdramatic-experiment, the piece attempts to conceptualize an act of creation as chaotic and multiple. Seeking to manifest the disintegration of logic, the harrowing hounding for knowing the unknowable that is at the eye of cosmic horror - on the level of artmaking and performance.
(This performance is an alternative, shorter version of the performance.)
Omer Keinan
with Máté Asbót
and Roi Becker
Big thanks to Nitzan Cohen and Nava Zuckerman, and the many practitioners and friends who have taken part, over almost three years, in developing the methodologies at the heart of this process.
Sunday, 13th March 2022, 7pm
HUABUN – Jihoon Choi, Jin Lee
(work-in-progress)
HUABUN (Potted plant), is a solo dance performance about expressing the inevitable position of humans who have to live in harmony between the other individuals and the society.
In the Blank check Festival, we are sharing part of the physical research of the HUABUN.
Concept and Choreography: Jihoon Choi, Jin Lee
Dance: Jin Lee
Music : Benny Omerzell
Dramaturgy : Jin Young Won
AGADA – Rotem Weissman
(world premiere)
AGADA is derived from the Hebrew song Agada Yapanit (Japanese Fable), written by Ehud Manor and composed by Ariel Zilber in 1972. The song describes a pointless tragedy about blind ambition precipitating absurd and unnecessary violence, with an implication that this cycle is inevitable.
Working with materials drawn from improvisation practice, the creation process unfolds as a dialogue between one body/imagination and others through interaction, reaction, and fantasy.
In AGADA, the song is utilized as the guiding thread of both the embodiment of each character, and the structure of the performance as a score, both playing between the mimesis of the song and its dismantling. AGADA emerged as an appeal to empathy: the physiological ability to feel like another, and to make a collective shift.
Choreography: Rotem Weissman
Co-Creation and Performance: Ariel Hayun, Jin Lee, Raz Mantell, Susanna Ylikoski and Ruby Frances Jones
Dramaturgy: Zuki Ringart
Residency: Tanz Station – Barmer Bahnhof
Thank to Lena Klink, Thusnelda Mercy, Pascal Merighi, Tai Rona, Tor Goffer, Shani Froy and Rebea Ter Braak and Tanz Station – Barmer Bahnhof.
