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Christina Ciupke & Ayşe Orhon: At Close Distance. 14.07.2017, Open Spaces Sommer Tanz, Tanzfabrik/Wedding, Berlin

In two pieces strung together under one title — a restaging of Christina Ciupke and Nik Haffner’s 2011 kannst du mich umdrehen preceded by a new work by Ciupke and Ayşe Orhon — two dancers experiment with stillness, velocity, trajectory, weight, and sound in pursuit of understanding kinetic memory and the „impossible past of a physical encounter“. Playing with a deeply affecting extension of the stage — the removal of traditional seats and trappings to create a deep and narrow space — the newest half is composed around symmetrical and asymmetrical balances, exploring positions which obligate the viewer to decide what they see and where their focus lies. Dressed in sheer beige stockings and bold sweaters, the dancers‘ movements are, despite varying in scale from the minute to very large, precise and controlled, but perhaps most alluring is how little sound their movements elicit: Ciupke in particular is eerily silent, giving the impression of watching some sort of modernistic sci-fi semiotic scenario unfold in a world of different physics from that of our own. Parallelograms — principles — proximities. If Ciupke and Orhon’s purported subject is memory, these fragments are fitting: each thing is almost unremarkable in the present moment, yet each thing etches itself with meaning on the memory of the viewer.