Artist-in-Garden Residency: Nora Tormann & Soroa Lear – Kulturgarten (22.05. – 11.06.23)
Nora Tormann and Soroa Lear create a dialogue between gardens and drags. Their research builds from the premise that both are curated representations which have the capacity to reflect/counter dominant social Norms. Drawing from Michele Foucault’s concept of the heterotopia – the notion of spaces which are somehow ‘other’, worlds within a world which can both mirror and disrupt what is outside – the research focusses on how the act of creating a garden can relate to practices of gender performativity:
How does the hypercuration of a garden relate to practices of drag and queering gender, thus questioning notions of the natural? Moreover, the garden projects a specific way of moving and performing onto the body; how can moving bodies in this space shape and reorder the performance of the garden? And, how does this apply to a public garden like Hellerau, which is a part of a cultural institution?
Drag-Mentoring:
The Darvish (IG: @thedarvishofficial)
The Darvish Syrian self-taught performance artist , Cultural events and performance Parties Organiser, Physical Theater Dancer, movement Workshop Facilitator, Digital Content Creator. Author and Activist of LGBTQAI+ rights.
Soroa Lear is a Cuban-American dancer and writer based in Berlin. She completed her studies in dance and comparative literature at Reed College, sparking an interest in the intersections between critical theory and movement. In her practice, she explores the ways in which movement can enable a reordering of our subjectivity, allowing relationality, pleasure, and affect to determine our experience of the self. Her practice is heavily influenced by Gaga, physical theater, and Berlin’s nightclub culture. Soroa continues this research in her weekly improvisation class, ‘Vibrant Body’, held at Tanzfabrik Berlin. She has performed with Sebastian Abarbanell, Nora Tormann, Cora Frost and Søren Siebel amongst others. Her written works have been published by Penny Press and Confluence Journal.
IG: soroalear
Nora Tormann is a Berlin-based performer, choreographer, and dance-dramaturg. Having a background in political theory and contemporary dance, Nora’s practice meanders on the fringes of artistic and theoretical research, pulling into question the paradigms that constitute each sphere of knowledge. Their choreographic work circulates around questions of how bodies work as political and philosophical emplacements – how ideological regimes shape bodies and vice versa. Latest works include the site-specific audio-walk TURN – cartography of a movement (2022), and physical prospects (2021, 2022). As a dance-dramaturg, Nora works with collectives and solo artists and is specifically interested in practices of care as a framework for doing dramaturgy. Nora is co-founder of CELESTIAL BODIES, a Europe-wide mobile artistic platform.
IG: noratormann