Bee dances

Bee Dances presents the first collaboration between Indonesian choreographer ninus and Berlin-based choreographer Kareth Schaffer. Originally planned as a live performance with performances in November 2020, Bee Dances has now moved to the digital space for known reasons and will be shown as a live stream at the end of February 2021. The work is an embodied exploration of what cultural exchange can mean in post-colonial times. How do different dance techniques inscribe themselves in the bodies of the six dancers from Indonesia and Europe – and how do the different streams of physical knowledge spread around the globe? Bee Dances maps the connections between contemporary dance, as it is often performed in Berlin, and traditional Indonesian dance techniques, tracing their interrelationships through a series of interventions, interviews, reconstructions and new choreographies. The famous Balinese love duet by I Mario, “Oleg Tamulilingan”, is a key reference, as is the “waggle dance” of the Asian and European honey bees (apis cerana and apis mellifera), which was first correctly described by the German zoologist Karl von Frisch the six dancers with live music by Klaus Janek and the gamelan musicians of the composer I Wayan Gede Purnama Gita, whose digital presences float on movable projection surfaces through the performance room of Uferstudios 1. Developed under the severe restrictions of the Berlin winter -Lockdowns explores Bee Dance’s notions of responsibility and closeness through a probing mutual pollination of movements, concepts, languages, stories, physicalities and performers.

online premiere feb 27th through Tanzfabrik, Berlin