Projects & Research // LVMEN (2016)

LVMEN is a mutually challenging as well as illuminating game between performers, camera and space. A game between the visible and the hidden, the familiar and the unfamiliar, the exhilarating and the terrifying: A challenge for both artists and audience fostering multiple  possibilities of reception, interpretation and reflection, and daring to glance ‘behind the scenes’ of both beauty and ugliness of the human condition.

For LVMEN the German dance label Emanuele Soavi incompany (its current production series ‘The Habit Cycles’ focuses on collaborations with international artists and labels) joins forces with Holland’s C-scope productions – Cora Bos-Kroese and Joris-Jan Bos (known for their exciting multidisciplinary way of working) – in order to put a blend of dance and live-photography to the test. 

As photography catches ‘one moment in time’, LVMEN catches a glimpse into the souls of five dancers from different generations:
Joke Zijlstra looks back on a very successful dance career, Lisa Kirsch and Federico Casadei are two young talents from the ‘incompany’ team, Cora Bos-Kroese and Emanuele Soavi were both dancers in major international companies and founded their own dance labels while being still successful solo performers.
By focusing on experience, knowledge and attitude towards life in relation to an individual body awareness, they face human intimacy, fears, pride, secrets, the discrepancy between self-perception and an “outside-visibility” and: the inevitably ageing body.

Photographer Joris-Jan Bos catches all these internal and physical dilemmas and pleasures, freezes them in time to prevent them from vanishing, as they would normally do on stage. Which choices of perspective and details – including actions that are not visible to the audience –  will he and his editing team make? This voyeur and paparazzo, who is constantly trespassing boundaries of privacy and intimacy, avoiding or dealing with the confrontation of the self, yet at the same time creating his own art.

And without light (lat. Lumen), there is no photography! Designer Tom Visser created a new software and a new light-object for LVMEN, and he is furthermore responsible for creating light-spaces that offer a wide range of possibilities for simultaneous actions to take place among the camera work, the projections and the performance on stage.

Choreography: Cora Bos-Kroese, Emanuele Soavi
Live photography: Joris-Jan Bos
Performance: Federico Casadei, Lisa Kirsch, Joke Zijlstra, Cora Bos-Kroese, Emanuele Soavi
Voice-over: Kate Strong
Lighting design: Tom Visser
Photography editing: Femke Blom, Robert Benschop
Technical management: Michael Götz, Loes Schakenbos
Production management: Silvia Werner, Achim Conrad
PR: Alexandra Schmidt, Carola van der Heijden
Management: Alexandra Schmidt / tanzmanagement.net