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NAH DRAN Extended/ Alice Heyward, Roni Katz, Louise Trueheart: re-dance. 22.04.2017, ada Studio, Berlin.

Stretching the imagination was the hallmark of Lee Meir’s exciting curation of works on dance and the archive for NAH DRAN, the most recent installment in ada Studio’s performance series devoted to new works of three young and promising choreographer-performers.

Alice Heyward began the evening with Beyond Before (Woolloomooloo), 2017, a carefully and beautifully structured work using scale, sound, and imaginative exercises, as well as source material from the historical ‚air mail dances‘ (as invented by Remy Charlip, who provided dancers with drawing as a base of the choreography), to speculate on translation, memory, and the nature of dance — a thoughtful, abstracted meditation on time and motion. Louise Trueheart’s matter v, a hyperbolic collage of objects, text, movement, nudity, sound, and instruction, created absurd, boggling, and sometimes hilarious juxtapositions; particularly entrancing was her silent, sonic composition created with the audience which demanded full attention and rapid thought, and produced a diaphanous result both intensely collaborative and unknowably singular. To end the evening, Roni Katz delivered her three-part work Slides, in which she grappled with the theme of why we begin dancing and why we continue (referencing her own history as well as the lineages of Yvonne Rainer, Tino Seghal, and Yasmeen Godder), but also delivered a nuanced perspective on the relationship between the moving body, language, and attention – her first section, featuring an accumulation of movements performed physically and pre-/de-scribed verbally, was interrupted by seemingly unrelated word splinters, giving clear form to the unclear processes of how we perceive, think, and move.

Dance and the body curated not for inward reflection or an exhumation of the past, but for the pull between interior and exterior worlds, gaps and leaps in time served with a sense of discovery, creation, humour, humbleness and imagination, but perhaps most impressive: the sincerity of each performance…