EDITIONS OF YOU
ABOUT THE PIECE
// In collaboration with theaterimballsaal
// Premiere: Freitag, 07. April 2006
Have you ever dreamed of being someone else, of exchanging bodies with someone? Would you be prepared to lose yourself for a "New Me" in order to die and be reborn? Compelled by the search for a new identity, four individual men come together for this experiment. Their faces bent over teetering stage, they become absorbed in a metamorphosis and explore the nature of the fantastical in a laboratory disguised as a theatre: "editions of you".
BY AND WITH
Created and danced by: Volkhard Samuel Guist, Martin Inthamoussú, Erich Rudolf, Geraldo Si /// Choreography and Direction: Rafaële Giovanola /// Original Music: Jörg Ritzenhoff /// Lighting Design: Marc Brodeur /// Costume Design: Sabine Schnetz /// Concept and Direction: Rainald Endraß
PRESS REVIEWS
"Scenes of joy change with scenes of fight – the fight with the image of oneself and how others perceive us. Humiliation and death, love and passion – access to what is happening becomes increasingly clear. Four men and their fight between the animal that has become dog, the crying and playing child, and the soft, sensitive and often suppressed emotional core that is looking for closeness, and the proud and egotistical male hero. (...) The bigger part of the audience was impressed by an expressive, perfect dance performance. The applause was rightly deserved for a production of pure emotional chaos and the intensive search for identity. However, this was a performance that you should take home in your mind and reflect upon, that awakens our curiosity for the discourse with our own identity."
"There are performances that make the audience very quiet. When you leave the theatre you have somehow become partly another person. During the festival "tanz nrw in Krefeld, there were
some moments in which movement started this transformation. The exciting interchanges of our state of the soul were shown by Cocoondance's "Editions of You" (...) Numerous times bodies
slammed into metal, the dancers had to die numerous deaths, and reinvent their figures again and again: Rafaële Giovanola has produced a show of souls that made it difficult for the audience
to breath with its breathtaking speed. (...) Animal instincts and in sparks: suffocating emotions, animal sexuality and humiliation: The guys had to endure numerous roles – and they did it
with bodies that spoke for themselves. This was not a theatre of movement, this was dance with impressive aesthetics. The balance did at no point skip to the side of sheer force."
(Petra Diederichs, Rheinische Post, 14.05.2007)
"Four people are standing at the wall. Waiting. Very quickly, a trial of strenght begins, first rather harmless. But then, the trial changes continuously between self-assertion and
submission, fight and humiliation. (...) Male identity develops within the dynamics of the group, is a product of forced dialogues of the body. This is not really dance, and some may regret
this, because in short pirouttes, lifting figures and jumps, one may catch a glimpse of how brilliant these dancers are."
(Westdeutsche Zeitung, 14th May, 2007)