tanz nrw 25

For the tenth time, the biennial festival tanz nrw offers comprehensive insights into recent developments in dance in North Rhine-Westphalia. From 08. -18.05. works by choreographers and collectives from NRW can be seen in nine cities. Festival programme: www.tanz-nrw-aktuell.de

Programme at PACT:

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Sat. 10.05. 18 h SPRUNGBRETT with Benze C. Werner & Julia Nitschke

SPRUNGBRETT (springboard) is a research and work residency not bound to production, granted to junior artists and graduates who primarily work in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) in the areas of dance, choreography, and performance. The organizers grant scholarships of two weeks each as part of the biennial festival, which takes place in nine cities across NRW. Scholarship holders are given the opportunity to immerse themselves in their current project; they receive organizational and dramaturgical support, as well as a grant and the chance to present their work-in-progress at several festival venues. It is for the sixth time now that the festival awards research scholarships for emerging artists from NRW.

](https://www.pact-zollverein.de/en/node/4804)

Photo: Oliver Look

If I dance for you and you just don't feel it, who has failed? Can working feelings – mine and yours - be alienating work? The performers try to feel intensely or trigger feelings. They explore personal and practical dance experiences of sensitivity as a valuable resource that is always under threat from the logic of utilisation. As a montage between dance, music and language, the piece brings together work and everyday realities that are characterised by more or less successful emotional management - and in which one's own sensitivity is in a service context. The ensemble SANFTE ARBEIT approaches the connection between emotion, dance and care work, based on the exchange with people in caring activities.

Photo: Jascha Viehstädt

In this double bill by Raymond Liew Jin Pin, the production Orchidee stands like an overture before his subsequent, also new piece Lotus Fight Club. The starting point is an examination of traditional Southeast Asian dances and autobiographical material to explore the movements of the queer diaspora: Together with the dancers from the Folkwang Tanzstudio, he explores the question of how to enter into relationships and build intimacy. The result is a fleeting fabric of bodies and memories - a dance between transience and permanence.

Welcome to the Lotus Fight Club: when night falls, the ribbons of the traditional Chinese ribbon dance turn into whips - an allusion to the sodomy law from the colonial era in Malaysia, which is still enforced by whipping. The choreography is driven by an energy that the dancers cannot escape. They must follow the rhythm of the ribbons - or submit to it. Desire and submission, fantasies of pleasure and punishment are staged here side by side as if in an arena as a place of competition. At dawn, the club is transformed into a training ground for rebellious dances and a ritual of resistance begins.