Fugen

Light Design / october 2015

Isabelle Schad

Concept, choreography and performance : Isabelle Schad
Dramaturgy : Sasa Bozic
Artistic assistance : Frances d’Ath
Associated artists : Laurent Goldring, Alain Franco
Light design : Mehdi Toutain-Lopez
Light : Benni Schröter
Costume : Charlotte Pistorius
Production management : Heiko Schramm
Production : Isabelle Schad
Co-production : HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Espace Pasolini (Valenciennes) Funded by the Governing Mayor of Berlin – Senate Chancellery – Cultural Affairs and the NATIONALES PERFORMANCE NETZ (NPN) Coproduction Fund for Dance, which is funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media on the basis of a decision by the German Bundestag
Supported by : Wiesen55 e.V.
Thanks to : Damir Simunovic ́, Emilie Chicaez, Bruno Pocheron, Marion Montel, Julia Rodriguez, Volker Hüdepohl, Paul Klier, Peter Rintsch, Emma Juliard, Vushkans, Matthias Kirschke, HAU3-Team, as well as Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, Jochen Knau, Heiko Schwarzburger, Gerhard Walter.

Special thanks to : Waltraud und Rainer Schad.

All photos on this page : Dieter Hartwig

With Fugues, Berlin choreographer and dancer Isabelle Schad continues her work between musical concepts and their expression in movement. Coming from a music background and a lifelong interest in the polyphonic work of J.S. Bach, she attempts to look at her own (hi)story and the origins of (her) movement between discipline and pleasure, examining the body and its energies in its materiality, process, and time.

The term fugue (Latin fuga, related to fugere ‘to flee’ and fugare ‘to chase’) unites two antagonistic principles in one and the same notion, and thus serves her as an analogy for the body in exercise, where the principles of chasing and fleeing, giving and receiving, emptiness and fullness are becoming one ; to be as much body as to be movement, as spirit, as self.

Schad starts off telling and showing. The piece becomes its own fugue : a form within a form. Playing with its respective compositional elements such as repetition and time delay, the work investigates the multiple rhythms, lines/lives and voices within one single body. Having for many years been in exchange with visual artist Laurent Goldring, her main questions around non-representational movements and visibility continue : how could the very notion of exercising become image ? How could energy itself become image ?

Fugues is an autobiographical work in which the performer’s body serves as an example for the construction of the individual within disciplines and systems one cannot escape from.