More Information to Damaged Goods «Sketches/Notebook», Dec, 11, 12 and 13.
© Iris Janke
Damages Goods
Damaged Goods is a flexible, open structure that facilitates the production of highly diverse projects and interdisciplinary collaborations. Meg Stuart and Damaged Goods have worked on over thirty productions, ranging from solos (XXX for Arlene and Colleagues, soft wear) to large-scale choreographies (Visitors Only, It’s not funny) and including site-specific creations (Highway 101), installations and improvisation projects (Auf den Tisch!, Crash Landing).
„To have company“ means that you are not alone, that you share yourself and your place with others. Damaged Goods is a constantly shifting identity, always redefining itself and searching for contexts. I think if you want to explore new territory you have to allow yourself to go to unfamiliar places. The company reconfigures from project to project, though I usually work with some dancers for more than one show. I like to create an open structure where dancers are independent and have the opportunity to do their own work and that of other artists. I think it feeds them and consequently the work. All these different people passing through change and shape the work’s nature.” Meg Stuart
Website Damaged Goods: http://www.damagedgoods.be/
@ Eva Würdinger
Meg Stuart
Born in New Orleans, Meg Stuart is an American choreographer and dancer who lives and works in Berlin and Brussels. She made her first dance studies as a teenager focussing on simple movement actions. Stuart decided to move to New York in 1983 and studied dance at New York University. Invited to perform at the Klapstuk festival in Leuven (1991), she created her first evening-length piece, Disfigure Study. Her subsequent piece, No Longer Readymade (1993), toured extensively and launched her artistic career in Europe. Interested in devising her own structure through which to develop artistic projects, Stuart founded Damaged Goods in Brussels in 1994. The following year, Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods was awarded a company subsidy from the Flemish government. Stuart was the first foreign choreographer to receive this grant, and has been supported by the Flemish cultural sector ever since.
Stuart strives to develop a new language for every piece in collaboration with artists from different creative disciplines – visual artists, choreographers, directors, musicians and designers, to name but a few. Greatly inspired by the visual arts, Stuart collaborated in her early choreographies with visual artists Gary Hill, Ann Hamilton, Lawrence Malstaf and musicians Vincent Malstaf and Hahn Rowe among others. As her work evolved, Stuart began to navigate the tension between dance and theatre. The use of theatrical devices, in addition to the dialogue between movement and narrative, are recurrent themes in her choreographies (Alibi, BLESSED). Residencies at the Schauspielhaus Zurich (2000-04) and the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz Berlin (2005-10) led to collaborations with the theatre directors Stefan Pucher, Christoph Marthaler and Frank Castorf.
Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods has an on-going collaboration with the Kaaitheater (Brussels) and the HAU Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin). On the invitation of intendant Johan Simons, 2015-2017 Meg Stuart & Damaged Goods will be collaborating with Ruhrtriennale.
Her work has travelled the international theatre circuit and also been presented at Documenta X in Kassel (1997), at Manifesta7 in Bolzano (2008) and at PERFORMA09 in New York. In 2008, Meg Stuart received a Bessie Award (New York) for her oeuvre and a Flemish Culture Award in the category of the performing arts. The Akademie der Künste (Berlin) awarded Meg Stuart the Konrad-Wolf-Preis in 2012. Tanz Magazine honored her as Choreographer of the Year 2014. More recently Meg Stuart was honored with the Grand Prix de la Danse de Montréal 2014.
In 2015-2016, Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods is touring Built to Last (2012), An evening of solo works (2013) Sketches/Notebook (2013), Hunter (2014) and UNTIL OUR HEARTS STOP(2015). Built to Last is Stuart’s first work inspired by existing music from different centuries and style periods. An evening of solo works presents a selection of former solos as well as excerpts from evening-length performances. In Sketches/Notebook, Stuart reveals a series of collective vignettes in which artists, objects and materials converge on stage. In her first evening-length solo creation Hunter, Stuart explores the history of her choreographic work and her own body as a living archive. For UNTIL OUR HEARTS STOP, she drew inspiration from people who retreat from the real world and create their own fantastic set of rules.
Meg Stuart at Gessnerallee
Bullt to Last, 2014 (Festival Keine Disziplin)
Biographies of performers and collaborating artists
Jorge Rodolfo de Hoyos is a performance artist who recently decided to stay in Berlin after five formative years in San Francisco. His work ranges from contemporary performance art for the stage, public interventions and communal ritual experiences to traditional Mexican Folkloric dance. He worked with Meg Stuart in the San Francisco edition of Auf den Tisch and has also worked with choreographers such as Sommer Ulrickson, Mark Franko, Nathaniel Justiniano/Naked Empire Bouffon Company and especially his mentors Keith Hennessy and Sara Shelton Mann. Jorge was born in Los Angeles, studied Cultural Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz, and co-organized a live-work studio with THEOFFCENTER, a community art space for incubating queer discourse. He has derived much of his energy from the vibrant communities that abound in the SF Bay Area (permaculture, sexual, spiritual, etc) as well as his close friends working in queer/contemporary performance and activism.
Antonija Livingstone is an independent performer and dance maker working in Montréal and Berlin. She initiated independent performance formations at Experimental Dance and Music Company Studios in Vancouver and at Movement Research Studios in New York. As a performer she worked with Benoît Lachambre, Meg Stuart, Vera Mantero, Lisa Nelson, and Eszter Salamon. Antonija Livingstone created several duets in collaboration with Antonia Baehr, Heather Kravas and Jennifer Lacey among others. Her work has been supported and presented by festivals such as Festival d’Avignon, ImpulsTanz and Tanz im August. In the past five years, she has been working for Circuit-Est Centre Choreographique in Montreal as a mentor and coach for emerging artists. Outside Canada, Antonija develops her mentorship occupation on a freelance basis.
Leyla Postalcioglu studied at Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen (Germany). She danced in Pina Bausch’s Tannhäuser Bacchanal and at the State Theatre Kassel under the direction of Kuo Chu-Wu and Johannes Wieland (2006-2010). In 2006 she worked as a choreographer's assistant for Cloud Gate Theatre2 for the restaging of Kuo Chu-Wu's Oculus. She performed in Kat Valastur's AH! OH! A Contemporary Ritual in 2014. Since 2010, she works as an independent dancer and choreographer in Istanbul and Berlin. Roof (2010) and Backyard (2012) are two of her most recent works. Since 2012 she gives improvisation workshops at the Dance Department of Yildiz Technical University. She received a DanceWEB Scholarship and a Turkish Cultural Foundation Cultural Exchange Fellowship in 2013. Leyla worked with Meg Stuart's forOff course (Istanbul, 2010), ATELIER I(2011), Sketches/Notebook (2013) and UNTIL OUR HEARTS STOP (2015).
Maria F. Scaroni danced in Italian TV productions, trained release-based and post-modern dance techniques and has a degree in literature. She likes contact improvisation and other forms of collectivity and eros, and has been interested in the theoretical side of practice. Her work focuses on the process of collaboration, plays with durational experiences and is featured by a crossbreeding between performance, choreography and installation. Meg Stuart invited her to take part in improvisational events, HAU series Politics of Ecstasy and Auf den Tisch! (2011) and later on to participate as a performer in Built to Last (2012), Sketches/Notebook (2013) and UNTIL OUR HEARTS STOP (2015).
Julian Weber was born 1986 in Bockenem, Niedersachsen. He studied Fine Arts in Braunschweig and Vienna. In this time he focused mainly on sculpture and installation. Since 2010 he studied dance and choreography at HZT, Berlin. In 2012 he was artist in residence in Stadtmühle Willisau in Switzerland, accompanied by a solo-exhibition "verwirrtes Land". His first choreography "gepresste Hände erzeugen Druck" was shown in Sophiensäle during Tanztage 2013. In the last years he took part in several group- exhibitions and made some performances and solo-exhibitions.
Brendan Dougherty is a Berlin based composer and musician. He is active as an improviser and producer of contemporary music and collaborates with Tony Buck, Jochen Arbeit and co-founded the bands Idiot Switch and Charrd. He has worked closely with choreographer Jeremy Wade, creating music for and performing in Throwing Rainbows Up (2008), I Offer Myself to Thee (2009) and There is No End to More (2009). His work with Meg Stuart began in 2009 when they curated an improvisation series in HAU theater's Politics of Ecstasy festival. They performed together in Dougherty's OURSONGISLONG (2009) and Stuart's Atelier I & II (2011 and 2012) and collaborated on VIOLET (2011) which is still touring Europe.
Vladimir Miller lives in Berlin and Vienna. His work and research focus on the topics of space and spectatorship in visual arts, research environments and performance. His often collaborative practice results in installations, scenography, performance, dramaturgy and video. In recent years Vladimir Miller collaborated on a number of works with the choreographers Philipp Gehmacher, Meg Stuart, Christine De Smedt, Claudia Bosse and others. Vladimir Miller also teaches at the postgraduate artistic research studies a.pass in Brussels. In collaboration with a.pass he researches spatial conditions and politics of production in the arts context. This research evolves through a series of shared curated workspaces called "Settlements".
Claudia Hill is an artist working with textiles in participatory projects. She first worked with Meg Stuart on the short film Breaking the Circle, followed by Moments, A performance in 10 acts at ZKM, a film project in collaboration with Michaël Borremans and the performance Sketches/Notebook. Hill previously created costumes for William Forsythe and The Wooster Group. She started her clothing line and costume design work in New York City, where she also worked on installations, performances and videos with artists, musicians and architects.
Mikko Hynninen, based in Finland, is an artist whose primary materials are sound and light. Trained both in the fine arts and as a light and sound designer, his work is moving between the theatre stage, contemporary music performance and the art galleries. He has collaborated on numerous theatre and dance productions as a lighting designer, composer and sound designer, lately projects by Danièle Desnoyers, Kate McIntosh, David Wampach and Marie Brassard. Hynninen’s solo work encompasses performance and installation. Latest works include ”Operator”, an automated opera for array of fluorescent tubes and "Theatre_#", a series of site-specific performances for empty theatre spaces. Sketches/Notebook is Hynninen’s first collaboration with Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods.
Ana Rocha studied Art History, Contemporary Art and Fine Arts. In the past years she has been working for the production of several festivals and institutions such as Festival da Fábrica, Alkantara Festival and Uferstudios. Rocha is trained in contemporary dance, contact improvisation and choreography. She participated as a performer to different projects initiated by Fabienne Audéoud, Jorge Gonçalves, Isabelle Schad among others. Rocha presented her debut solo work Fraud by Nature at Tanztage Festival 2012 in Berlin. She is part of Transfabrik, a transdisciplinary project on writing and criticism in the performing arts directed by Franz Anton Cramer. She worked with Meg Stuart as her assistant for Built to Last (2012), Sketches/Notebook (2013) and Hunter (2014).
Nicola Rebeschini is an independent researcher, artist and dance performer living in Paris. His research focuses on the theory and practice framing the process of creation in the field of interdisciplinary contemporary arts. His work is concentrating on the concepts of image, body and movement, empty space and, in particular, on the artistic creation as organic image of experience and on dance as action in an imaginary field. He develops an experimental methodology on visual and intuitive dramaturgy of dance in immersive spaces. Nicola obtained several university degrees in Italy and France and is working on a PHD for the Sorbonne University in Paris. For that matter an important part of his current research concentrates on Meg Stuart's work .
Kahori Furukawa, born in Japan, studied Art and Fashion Design at London’s College of Fashion. She worked as a producer and designer for the label ‘Possion Ezzo’ and established her proper mode label ‘Souler’ in 2005. Kahori Furukawa and Meg Stuart worked together for Sketches Notebook (2013) and Hunter (2014).