Centre for Contemporary Performing Arts

One Flat Thing, reproduced
One Flat Thing, reproduced begins with a roar. Twenty tables, like jagged rafts of ice, fly forward and become the surface, the underground and the sky inhabited by a ferocious flight of dancers. A pack of bodies raging with alacrity, whipping razor-like in perilous weaves, in a hurtling intelligence. The music of Thom Willems begins quietly and then blows up into a gale, hurling the dancers toward the end, their bodies howling in a voracious, detailed storm.
The 10 year member-ship at Ballett Frankfurt was the best experience for Jacopo Godani as dancer and choreographer at that time. It is for this very reason that he wanted to provide a major opportunity for the dancers of Dresden Frankfurt Dance Company to explore William Forsythe ´s universe. One Flat Thing, reproduced was the choreographic work in his repertoire that offered this thrilling occasion.
Students of the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst Frankfurt am Main and the Palucca Hochschule für Tanz Dresden will be joining in for One Flat Thing, reproduced during this program not only for the rehearsals and performances with the company but also for the daily training. DFDC aims to share its professional experience with future generations of dancers in order to nurture growth, awareness and artistic responsibility.

Lux Tenebris
As dancers and independent choreographers, Rafael Bonachela and Jacopo Godani had long admired each other’s work. The pair first met fleetingly when Bonachela was a dance student in London and undertook a secondment with the Ballett Frankfurt under the artistic direction of William Forsythe. At the time Godani was one of the company’s key dancers. Over the following decades their paths occasionally crossed via social and dance network circles, however their first professional encounter was when Bonachela invited Godani to create a work for the Sydney Dance Company in 2010.
 “Light and Darkness. This work started and was driven by how the music should sound. I worked with Nick Wales as he composed – I fed into that process to capture an emotional sense. I wanted contrast and visceral edges. I was interested in the unfamiliar and the industrial. I wanted to evoke an instinctual connection between people and wanted to draw out the tension that comes from those interactions: the human encounters that surround us as they move into and out of focus and light, blinded at times by direct light or looking sideways into the edge of the shadow.
For me, there was a driving force about how light and darkness affects us all, our moods, our memories of specific periods in our lives – the physical sense of light and darkness, overlaid with the emotional connections to those contrasting worlds.
My collaborators have contributed enormously to the sum of the work. Ben Cisterne’s design brings its own evocations, intimate spaces distinguished from the broader whole, bound by the edges of the shadows the bulbs create. I was really interested in the transitions from the liminal spaces at those edges, the transition between the inky black and the pooled light.
 The dancers have always been my faithful collaborators. Before any movement came into play, I invited them to creatively respond to the score in whatever way they wanted to. Some responded with drawing, some with poetry, some with prose. These initial responses all became part of the process and creation. The dancers give of themselves personally. They bring their own experiences to the studio, and the trust we have as an ensemble delivers its own authenticity and openness. For that I am very grateful.”  (Rafael Bonachela)

Lux Tenebris is a co-production of the Dresden Frankfurt Dance Company and  Sydney Dance Company, supported by the Nelson Meers Foundation and the Sydney Dance Company Commissioning Fund.

www.hellerau.org
www.dresdenfrankfurtdancecompany.com