«…Why should you gaze on the dance of SHULAMMITE as on the dance of two armies?...» is an ensemble performance with several robots and one dancer. The performance looks to the grotesque body images in Shir ha Shirim (Song of Solomon) and how beauty ideals is presented in an expanded media reality.
A female dancer accompanied by an interactive robot/sculpture ensemble create extended movements and close-ups of sound of the dancers body. With its human and hyper-human performers, the performance moves between the blurred boundaries that seem to separate body and image, humans and machines, the inner and the outer, beauty and the grotesque. Questions surrounding how the desired body is presented, how we relate to body taboos and its unpleasantness , is staged in a generous, visual composition with imagery of sound. How do we see body and beauty, and how do these ideas take shape, change, and how are they filtered? Where do the grotesque, the transformative, the edited and the artificial body meet?
This is the Norwegian dancer/choreographer Mia Habib’s first collaboration with German composer/performance artist Timo Kreuser. The possibilities for an integral meeting between music and performance, the specifics and development of artistic expression in musicians and electronics is a central theme in Kreusers work. Habibs starting point is an ongoing interest in the transformative body, which is clear through her critical perspective on our culture when it comes to body, identity, community and dance. Habib was last seen at Black Box Theater in 2011 with her performance «Head(s)».
By: Mia Habib & Timo Kreuser. Performer, choreography & concept:: Mia Habib. Composer og consept: Timo Kreuser. Sound director: Wilm Thoben. Light designer: Ingeborg S. Olerud. Dramaturg & producer: Ida-Elisabeth Larsen. Producer: Martin Døving. Light sculpture: FELD studio for digital crafts. Producer: Mia Habib Productions. Co-production: Black Box Teater, THE TRACKWORKERS , NOTAM, Elektronisches Studio TU Berlin, FG Audiokommunikation, PNEK. With support by: Norsk Kulturråd, Fond for Utøvende Kunstnere and AHAB SHIPPING CO.productions. In residency: Dansarena NORD and Black Box Teater.