Happily Ever After,
Grasshopper,
Box

read the original article

Reutlinger General-Anzeiger / Culture, Monday, 07.02.2011: "Love, wit and rituals" / Sonja Lenz

Dance – Onrush at the »Internationales Tanztheater XI«, Tonne Theatre: Venue at Planie 22 insufficient to accommodate theatregoers

Reutlingen ... The theatregoers who managed to get a ticket experienced on Saturday an evening full of poetry and passion, characterized by forms of synthesis, ritual and conflict.

The »wee dance company« Berlin stood for synthesis. In three different choreographies they thrilled the audience with their physical language of togetherness. The dancers repeatedly take up their partners' movement impulses and continue them with their bodies. Often do two bodies combine into one unit of movement, the dancers enwinding in intricate lifts and rolls, melting in an expression of organic energy flow.

Movingly, downright bewitchingly, they achieved this in the duet »happily ever after«: Dan Pelleg and Nora Hageneier demonstrated in floating, elegant forms, how the entanglements of love and the abandon in it can lead to a state of feyness.

...

The »wee dance company«'s two other performances dealt, with charm and wit, with different instances of the human condition: in »Grasshopper«, four people in suits (Nora Hageneier, Dan Pelleg, Mayra Wallraff und Marko E. Weigert) interact on and with two stretches of artificial lawn as well as diverse umbrellas.

Their movements, at times dreamy, at times robotically hectic or weary and crookedly scuttling, are retrospectively, through a final video image, interpretable as a picture suite of German workaday life: a screen upstage displays a top view of the four dancers in suits, ready to picnic, sitting in green grass, surrounded by birds' twittering. The camera zooms the motive into the distance, the idyllic nature scene is revealed to be a narrow median strip on a four track highway.

In »Box«, Dan Pelleg and Marko E. Weigert discover the physicalness of two huge cardboard boxes. They caress them, romp over them, transform them into a Punch and Judy stage, from behind which they keep emerging in new poses.

read the original article