GRADINGER/SCHUBOT

The Nature of Us

In their duets “YEW” and “YEW: outside” Angela Schubot and Jared Gradinger immersed them-selves deeply in Nature and its inherent intelligence. For the third part of their cycle they have invited both plant allies as well as five human performers as well as a sound and light gardener and finally the audience to a post-human group choreography “The Nature of Us.” The heterogeneous

ensemble on the stage of HAU 2 creates a soilless garden with multiple voices to emerge from sounds and bodies. “The Nature of Us” invites its audience, human and otherwise, into this ecosystem – and searches for a consciousness that neither suppresses nor exaggerates nature, instead making space for a co-creative polyphony. How can we come together to be the garden that we actually are? In the more than 10-year history of their collaboration, “The Nature of Us” is the first ensemble piece by the choreographer duo Schubot & Gradinger.

 

With the aim of initiating a change in collective consciousness, the new choreography by Jared Gradinger and Angela Schubot in conjunction with five human and ten plant performers is a sensitive plea for the dissolution of the human-nature dichotomy.

Concept & choreografie: Angela Schubot and Jared Gradinger in collaboration with Nature

With and by Comfrey, Andreea David, Fern, Geranium, Golden Rod, Jared Gradinger, Chestnut, Clover, Lav-ender, Roberto Martínez, Moss, Andrius Mulokas, Liz Rosenfeld, Datura, Anouk Thériault, White Sage, Rosehip, Birch and other

Lightgarden: Annegret Schalke

Soundgarden: Stefan Rusconi

Costume: Claudia Hill

costume assistant: Diane Esnault, Emilia Patrignani

space assistant: Jonas Droste

artistic collaboration: Sigal Zouk

coaching: Shannon Cooney

assistant: Sofia Fantuzzi

photo: Rachel de Joode

press and production: björn & björn

 

Produced by Angela Schubot and Jared Gradinger. Co-production HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Ponderosa and Nature. Supported by Hauptstadtkulturfonds

 

Premiere HAU2 Hebbel am Ufer February 28th-March 3rd 2019

Weasels, trolls, anteaters, mumins? In addition, chirps, marbles, whispering - like melodic echolalia of an unknown language without speaking, without the compulsion of grammar, more like something pearly, something that grows in a vegetative pulse but never becomes a pure rhythm, more like the modulation movements of a humming ecosystem. Later, the chimella shells turn into music that sounds like the child touching time*, like repetitive snippets of lullabies of another species or perhaps more of a new entity that removes the compulsion of taxonomies - not like a snake, the skin, but like two bodies that lay down their bodily boundaries, like the attempt to do so, commented by this symphonic jazz number: Does anyone laugh at the pathos of desire to become one? So much desire at all between persuasion, bewitchment, violence and mountains of loudspeakers - a festival of survival that has nothing reassuring about it, a solidarity in the unknown that turns into intoxication, and right in the middle: oases of quiet intensities. (Four point Five: Writing on Dance)

 

 

Breathing, heaving, panting: are they pumping each other up with new breath or are they sucking all the air from each other’s lungs?

The connection by the mouth may be a communal attempt at supporting the weak in solidarity, but it may just as well be a fight for survival, with the strongest emerging victorious. They are rough, they are raw, they are fearless, sharing secrets and hissing excitedly in each other’s ears – I, too, want to hear! Wild and. The energy is high, the performers are high, the audience is high – save the man in green who has fallen asleep in the corner. (Four point Five: Writing on Dance)