AUREA Variations (2020/21)
„And the earth was waste and without form; and it was dark on the face of the deep …“
Starting with the Old Testament’s first lines, Emanuele Soavi invited the dancer and choreographer Susanne Linke in 2014 for a movement research on the issue of order, structure and its opposite: chaos. The result is a very personal solo performance by Soavi about man’s longing for perfection and beauty, the search for freedom in limitations and for perfection in chaos. Johann Sebastian Bach also seeks and finds this perfection through the mathematical structure in his piano music. Played live and continued in improvisations by Thomas Wansing, the finely tuned interaction possibilities of both arts open up.
Further information, images and video material AUREA Solo here
AUREA Variations on Bach (2015)
Together with the baroque ensemble of the Duisburg Philharmonic and the protagonists of his ensemble, Soavi varied and expanded the theme into a dialogue of ‘black’ ancestral figures between past and future in an organic-dystopian landscape. Bach’s ‘Musical Sacrifice’ gave the structure to the choreography.
AUREA Installation (2017)
For the modern church of St. Gertrud in Cologne, Soavi created a walk-in installation based on the dance material. Expanded to include the actor Achim Conrad and the sound designer Stefan Bohne, it invited the visitor to reflect on life and death, on the artificial and the organic, on devotion and self-discovery, machine and human.
AUREA Variations (2020)
AUREA Film (2021)
This version for five dancers, pianist and sound artist – created shortly after the first Corona lockdown in co-production with the Kölner TanzFaktur – gave a strangely actual insight at the social situation in times of the pandemic.
In an ongoing ritual, lonely black figures peel themselves from mountains of paper, rise like phoenixes from the ashes, like survivors of extreme events, become increasingly human, perceive, feel. Music breaks the silence and from now on accompanies this fascinating process of becoming human: with his own sounds and electronic compositions, Stefan Bohne adds an additional exciting, contemporary component to Thomas Wansing’s piano sounds.
This interdisciplinary work of art, elaborately filmed by Marcela Vanegas and Roberta de Lacerda Medina and including an introduction by Stefan Bohne, you can see here.
Idea / Choreography: Emanuele Soavi
Performance: Federico Casadei, Taeyeon Kim, Mihyun Ko, Josefine Patzelt, Emanuele Soavi
Live-Piano: Thomas Wansing
Live-Sound: Stefan Bohne
Based on the solo-performance AUREA by Emanuele Soavi, created in 2014 in collaboration with Susanne Linke.
Camera / Editing: Marcela Vanegas, Roberta de Lacerda Medina
Photos: Ursula Kaufmann, Meritxell Aumedes