NA: I met my grandmother after her death. It was in France.
JA: In France... at the Eiffel Tower?
NA: (Laughs) No, I was sitting in the back of a car.
JA: Which grandmother was it?
NA: My father's mother. She told me to thank my mom from her.
JA: Did you tell your mother?
NA: Yeah.
JA: And what did she say?
NA: She said 'Oh, why is grandma in France?'
CLOUDS ON CLEAR SKY is a series of dance performances resulting from a longterm investigation into experiences around death, mourning, and finiteness as a reality at the very core of life. Working with dancers of different generations and backgrounds, my role in this project is that of an interlocutor and facilitator for each of them. Revisiting autobiographical experiences, reflecting upon emotional and political implications of death, as well as diving into its iconographic and metaphorical notions are tools for the search of an individual physical language aimed at translating an untranslatable phenomenon. While anchoring in their own anatomy and tuning into breath, skin, the weight of bones and flesh, on every one of the four consecutive nights, another dancer invites the audience to share their experience and a moment of intimate self-encounter.
Encompassing and interweaving the three solos and one duet of a father and his teenage daughter is the spacial design: an installation of blackboard-like surfaces on parts of the floor and the walls serves as a canvas for the dancers, who can choose to trace and/or outline re-mark-able moments of their dance with chalk. As reminders of past moments, lines and traces accumulate and become both, indexes of absence and additional presences. Unfolding in space and over the course of four consecutive evenings, CLOUDS ON CLEAR SKY awakens a heightened sense for the passage of time, as well as for our experience of loss, memory and transformation.
Artistic direction, choreography: Johanna Ackva |Performance, co-choreography: Regina Baumgart, Jan Burkhardt, emeka ene, Sophie Kuhlmann, Akemi Nagao | Production: Valerie Terwei | Music: Evelyn Saylor | Video, projection: Max Hilsamer | Costume and space design: Bettina Mileta | Outside-eye, dramaturgical advise: Roni Katz | Artistic assistance: Carrie McILwain | Technical support: Aiko Okamoto | Graphic Design: Ana Halina Ringleb | Photography: Uta Neumann, Aïsha Mia Lethen | PR: Aïsha Mia Lethen | Funded by: Hauptstadtkulturfonds, Berlin | Developed in cooperation with: Display, Berlin and Vierte Welt, Berlin
