The second festival edition presents the recent works of the nein9 community, highlighting on-going processes and practice-led investigations. Audiences are invited to participate in the research of everyday life - ways of being with, in, and through the world.
The festival also marks the expansion of nein9 through new members and bridges with international collectives, encouraging additional practitioners to encounter and join the community.
Blank Check Festival 2023 is fantasy, uncertainty, comedy, tragedy, resistance, depth, mythology, improvisation, liberation, utopia, ritual, and suggestion.
The performers lean, tend, fall, smash, sketch, distort, underline, clarify, question, create.
Language: englisch
Duration: 60-90 min
Core members: Lena Klink, Omer Keinan, Raz Mantell, Ruby Frances Jones, Susanna Ylikoski, Erika Kooki Filia
Extended members: Andrea Givannovich, Useless Machines, Aha Kollektiva, Birke van Maartens
PROGRAM
Thursday, September 21, 2023,at 7 p.m.
solar bear - Lena Klink
YOU CHANGE ME CHANGE - Birke van Maartens
/
Friday, September 22, 2023,at 7 p.m.
Continuing containing - Raz Mantell and Susanna Ylikoski
Mythologies - Omer Keinan
/
Saturday, September 23, 2023,at 7 p.m.
an album - Erika Kooki Filia
STAY HYDRATED - Useless Machines
/
Sunday, September 24, 2023,at 7 p.m.
Mythologies - Omer Keinan
Vignettes, in progress - Ruby Frances Jones
/
DETAILED PROGRAM
Thursday, September 21, 2023,at 7 p.m.
solar bear
Lena Klink
World premiere
40 min
Is a solo dance work in which the performer awakens in a sphere, where the boundaries between post-apocalyptic desolation and utopian dreams blur. As if fueled by the sun, possible futures are painted through memories, assumptions, and visions. Imaginations of control, dependence, and power in relation to technology and nature weave into one another, when elements on the spectrums of cyber-and solar punk are balancing.
Yet, in the complexity of reality, even the most ideal utopia desires its self-preservation and remains inherently imperfect. What is paradise to one could be another's dystopian nightmare.
solar bear asks what is that world we are going to?
Choreography, movement: Lena Klink(she/her)
Composition Sound: ASA 808(he/they)
Composition Light: Vito Walter(he/him)
(Intermission)
YOU CHANGE ME CHANGE
Birke van Maartens
25 min
Change possesses the power to liberate or lay waste –a force that drives transformation. It disrupts the established order, daring to introduce something new. But is order itself a dance of ever-shifting structures and a pattern of recurring change? As we eagerly embrace change, aiming for progress, we must confront a paradox: Progress often obscures the ethical foundations we hold dear, and while we celebrate it, ethics are running behind. Within the fluid rhythm of ebb and flow, the true essence of our transient existence unfolds —a call to embrace the unfolding narrative of life itself.
Choreography, Artistic Concept: Birke van Maartens (she/her)
Performance, Co-Creation: Raul Nahum Aranha (he/him)
Audio Arrangement, Light Design: Kenji Tanaka (he/him)
Friday, September 22, 2023,at 7 p.m.
Continuing containing
Raz Mantell and Susanna Ylikoski
World premiere
40 min
In the 2nd chapter of our research on un-naming and collaboration, we look at water. Water is indifferent and yielding as it has no form of its own, it has no self: no inside nor outside. Yet, it always has a shape as it takes the form of the other. Water both contains and is contained. Our work reflects like water does, on the mundane beautythat comes forth from a positioning of multiple perspectives. We do not want to be water, but rather like water be containers and be contained.
Creation, Performance: Raz Mantell (she/her), Susanna Ylikoski (she/her)
(Intermission)
Mythologies
Omer Keinan
World premiere
35 min
You are invited to share stories from your daily lives. We will break them down into images (signs) and play around with them. Through an improvisational game of signification, the signs are used to re-codify the body and generate a communal way-of-being. Aiming to excavate and weave the stories’ latent meanings, which are then manipulated and multiplied to become symbolic.
By examining how we retell and narrate our own experiences, we can reveal our mythology: A cultural phenomenon which shapes a community’s morals and practices.A“natural” common-sense(and symbolic-order) which altersour understanding of reality and agency to interact with it.
By Omer Keinan
With Erika Kooki Filia, Lena Klink
Saturday, September 23, 2023,at 7 p.m.
an album
Erika Kooki Filia
World premiere
25 min
This piece should be approached as a short amateur punk album, where we will co-sing futile systemic grievances, try to flirt and observe the idea of deconstructing ballet, whilst decorating a Christmas tree that will descend to nothingness. Bound by informality this piece will try to knit short personal and collective commentaries around patterned embodiment of social defeat in four choreographic ‘songs'.
Choreography, performance Erika Kooki Filia (they/them)
(Intermission)
STAY HYDRATED
Useless Machines
40 min
A physical theater performance combining dance, sport, comedy and of course a lot of water. Experimenting with transforming a simple and common action such as drinking water into a sportive and artistic act.
An improvisational practice reflecting on our consumption of water in everyday life: Make your water drinking into a mindfulness exercise. Bring the glass to your lipsthenslowly tip the glass.Just a bit and keep it there. Breathe, give it some oxygen, caress it with your tongue, experience the water, become the water. Swallow, feel it run down your throat and there it is. You have just taken the first sip of water in your life.
Creation, Performance: Elliot Norell Strinno, Elias Kraft, Hyungjin Lee, Simon Chatelain
Sunday, September 24, 2023,at 7 p.m.
Mythologies
Omer Keinan
35 min
You are invited to share stories from your daily lives. We will break them down into images (signs) and play around with them. Through an improvisational game of signification, the signs are used to re-codify the body and generate a communal way-of-being. Aiming to excavate and weave the stories’ latent meanings, which are then manipulated and multiplied to become symbolic.
By examining how we retell and narrate our own experiences, we can reveal our mythology: A cultural phenomenon which shapes a community’s morals and practices.A“natural” common-sense(and symbolic-order) which altersour understanding of reality and agency to interact with it.
By Omer Keinan
With Erika Kooki Filia, Lena Klink
(Intermission)
Vignettes, in progress
Ruby Frances Jones
World premiere
20 min
vignettesnoun
1.a brief evocative description, account, or episode
2.a small illustration or portrait photograph which fades into its background without a definite border
Hypothesis: the intimate union of movement and disguise speaks truths that words dare not touch.
“Vignettes” is a procession of punctuated images, cropped and pasted. Each image holds a character, and each character is born of a posture, which is born of a feeling. The face each character wears asks its gesture-body to be heard. This is a physical theater solo performance exploring character-based improvisation, gesture, mime, and masked theater.
Choreography, performance: Ruby Frances Jones