Dresden Frankfurt Dance Company

The dance of the DFDC is just as closely linked to classical dance as it is to other developments in contemporary dance history. The double bill “Byways” combines a piece by Ioannis Mandafounis, in which he delves into dance history, and a new work by Rosalind Crisp, who is internationally recognised for the way she breaks with the conventions of dance performance.

“Eins vor, zwei zurück”, Ionnis Mandafounis

As much as Ioannis Mandafounis is influenced by the innovations that were made in dance improvisation in the second half of the 20th century, his artistic journey is also that of a ballet dancer. To pay tribute to this double heritage he creates a new piece for a small cast that contrasts classical dance technique with the development of improvisational dance and his own method of live-choreography. Two dancers from the ensemble will encounter Jón Vallejo from the Semperoper Dresden. This is a deep dive both into dance history and into the biography of a dancer. The passion, the grit, the endurance, glamour, doubts, triumphs and injuries – it’s all fiction and it’s all true. 

“Seen Unseen”, Rosalind Crisp

Rosalind Crisp's artistic passion is in using compositional tools to ‘forget’ movements and reveal instead how they can be forever reforming themselves when freed from set patterns and meanings. Her practice works with the constant changingness that relates to the reality of our material bodies - and that reflects, more and more starkly, the world that we are ‘undoing’. Her compositional tools invite dancers to absorb, recreate and transmit this continual changingness. She will engage the dancers of DFDC not with the psychology of what they experience, but with the corporeality of it.

As one principle to enable that vulnerability the dancers will inhabit the transitions where something is not yet one thing nor another, while drawing the audience's attention to how movement is forming, rather than to the moves thereby produced.In this practice rupture is as valid and important as flow. The work is presented in a setting of proximity where the audience can move and shift their own bodies throughout the space. Pianist and composer Frédéric Blondy will improvise live, adding his similarly visceral treatment of the piano to the dance.