What if the “greats” of history weren’t really the people whose names everyone knows today? Are losers only losers because they were never in the right place at the right time? Would we have ever discovered gravity if Newton had been hit on the head by a brick rather than an apple? Plato was incredibly smart but in a shoot-out with Jesse James there would only have been one winner. What use is being a genius?
American/German/Swedish/Israeli multidisciplinary artists David Kern, Tamar Lamm, and Tilman O’Donnell have created a mixture of satire, concert and competitive hoedown featuring such famous historical figures as Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Einstein, Joan of Arc, Socrates, Maria Callas, Abraham Lincoln and Sigmund Freud.
Premiere Weld, Stockholm January 31st 2020.
By & With: David Kern, Tilman O’Donnell, Tamar Lamm
Lights: Thomas Zamolo
THE VIEW FROM HERE
CHOREOGRAPHY:
Tilman O’Donnell
SOUND DESIGN & COMPOSITION
Dehendrik Lechat Willekens
LIGHTING DESIGN
Thomas Zamolo
PERFORMERS
Maria Pilar Abaurrea Zardoya, Matthew Branham, Kit Brown, Samuel Denton, Laura Lohi, Yiorgos Pelagias, Kristian Refslund
REHEARSAL DIRECTOR
Mattias Suneson
PRODUCTION:
Leonie Wichmann
A special thank you to Jenny Nordberg
PROGRAM NOTES:
When I was growing up my uncle used to send me SX-70 Polaroid photos in the mail. The images were from his travels as a film worker in Hollywood, and depicted everything from elaborate film sets to the anonymity of hotel room doors, or the view of an empty street corner in a small town where he was on location.
On the backs of these photos he would write a short note of what he saw and where he was. Always with the heading: The View From Here.
This dance is inspired by these snapshots into other places, both fantastical and simple, and the gift of receiving a one of a kind, momentary account of another person.
’The View From Here’ is a community of performers that hear, that see, that move, that pause. Dancing with and between utilitarian rehearsal wings (the simplest of theater technologies) the performers cover and reveal, refract and defer.
The musicality of these entrances and exits is captured in real time, via microphone, and woven into a sound score. The continuity in sound juxtaposed with the dis- appearance and reorganization of each visual scene underscores a continuity of discontinuity. That our meanderings, our comings and goings, define us more vibrantly than a fixed linear notion of self and other.
’The View From Here’ is a meditation on these procedures of change - corporeal, spatial, temporal, and sonic.
It is a series Polaroids to my uncle, and to all of you.
