Berst

about the piece

“Berst“ tries to create transitions. It demands “confessions“ from its performers so as to free them from anonymity. Speech and dance are closely related but do not mingle. But in the texts’ wake, an explosive dance comes into being, a dance whose ephemeral occurrence is marked or cartographed by intellectual thinking. This allows for the discovery of the reserves and potential of feelings and formulates the question: how can you dance, therefore live. Feelings once again prove to be an ephemeral phenomena, and “Berst“ again loses its dancers to the dance.

videos

credits

Choreography: C. Winkler | Dance: Lydia Clement, Heini Nukari, Kazue Ikeda, Odile Seitz, Peggy Ziehr, Miriam Kohler | Music: Ulf Langheinrich, Panacea, Fennesz, The Doors.
Production: Christoph Winkler and funded by Senate Department for Science, Research and Culture.

reviews

"Burst" is the title of the latest work by choreographer Christoph Winkler, which recently premiered at the Theater am Halleschen Ufer. In Berlin's independent dance scene, the wunderkind Winkler is considered one of the city' s most innovative talents, one only has to think of his incredible solo choreographies at the Tanztage. "Burst" is a group piece between dance and spoken theatre. Between silence and muffled, sometimes siren-like electronic droning and humming, the six dancers reveal terrible, intimate memories, such as the feeling of loss at the fake death of a father, the abortion of an already dead child or even the paradoxical moment of discovering love in the face of death. They confess that it is almost impossible for them to dance these things. The spoken word serves as a guideline for the dance language. They try ... Winkler's system is clever. Of course, we try to rediscover the aforementioned feelings in the movements. We even believe to see them. In one scene, a dancer documents the gaze of the observer, raising the question whether what we are seeing is the action, the fictitious traces of what was expressed, or only the heard word. Christoph Winkler's Berst is a complex system of mechanisms in which the expression of feeling ultimately becomes unrecognizable.
Berliner Morgenpost

In his new piece "Burst", which premiered this weekend at the Theater am Halleschen Ufer, Winkler has once again worked with six dancers. While in the previous piece everything was based on structure and outward appearance, the choreographer now inquires into the inwardness, the respective personal drives of the dancers. I am Lydia Clement says the dancer Lydia Clement and tells of her first love, which coincided with the death of her grandfather. I am Anja Hempel says the dancer Anja Hempel and tells how her father enjoyed faking suicide with a pistol to frighten his children. Later, another dancer will claim to be Lydia Clement or Anja Hempel and claim their story as her own. It is similar with the movements. Large parts of the piece have been worked out with the dancers as soloists, at times they all seem to simultaneously be dancing their own solo, with imperceptible transmissions of movements, a casual shoving of the same sequences into each other. These are the evening's great moments, in which the dancers' relationships with each other and with the space become mysteriously condensed.
Berliner Zeitung

What can be danced?, asks Christoph Winkler in his new piece "Burst". Each individual story follows its own path of movement and the resulting complex web of material bears witness to a special talent for building spaces out of bodies... Since his invitation to the Platform in 2002, he has had the reputation of being a beacon of hope for the development of dance. In "Burst", he scatters texts into the choreography like firecrackers, waiting to see where the snippets of the narrative ignite and where not. An evening well worth seeing!
Märkische Allgemeine

...in his production "Berst", Winkler subjects complex forms to a risky test: The context of the dance is formed by biographical stories, but not in order to be absorbed in the expressive gesture, but to address the separation and gaps between inner emotion and outer movement.
- TAZ