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How Prue Lang Is Redefining Contemporary Dance

Prue Lang — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 04:21:17 +0000

How Prue Lang Is Redefining Contemporary Dance

CULTURE & CONVERSATIONS, MUSIC, ART, BOOKS & SCREEN

Interview of Prue Lang by Leila Lois // photographs by Pippa Samaya

Prue Lang, internationally acclaimed Australian dancer and choreographer, has travelled far and wide for her art form, dancing with elite companies around the world. In recent years, she has relocated back to her hometown, Melbourne and continues to create groundbreaking work. Lang sat down with Leila Lois to discuss her creative process, the evolution of her love for contemporary dance, and her vision for the future of empathy in art.

Thank you for making time for this conversation, Prue. You’ve had an extraordinary career so far, working with some of the world’s most innovative dance companies, from Centre du Danse in France, to William Forsythe’s Ballet Frankfurt and The Australian Dance Theatre, all the while growing your own choreographic practice. What initially drew you to choreography as your primary form of expression?

I think what drew me to choreography was the ability to communicate without words—to express complex ideas through the body. I was always fascinated by movement, even as a child. There’s something profound about the way dance exists simultaneously as both ephemeral and deeply physical. It has become a way for me to reconnect with environmental diversity in my practice, as I have lived and experienced the world in several different places. My practice is based on expanding physical diversity and new ways beyond our own body and membrane. A massive inspiration for my choreographic practice is understanding multiple ways of being. Choreography became my language for investigating these philosophical questions while creating experiences that resonate emotionally with audiences.

Your work often explores the relationship between technology and the human body. How do you approach this intersection in your creative practice?

In my most recent work, POESIS, I was inspired by the notion of umwelt– the unique sensory world of an organism or animal and how they experience it- we’ve been looking at animals through human perception over generations, as opposed to how they understand the world. I see technology not as something separate from humanity but as an extension of human creativity. For example, when looking at the octopus, they have no bone, neurones based in their arms, suction pads which taste and feel, they camouflage with colour and texture and can recognise and perform complex motions with different parts of the body. I wanted to expand my dancers’ proprioception – looking at how else we can move- which speaks to understanding, knowing and also empathy.

In my practice, I’m interested in how digital tools can enhance rather than replace the physical intelligence of dancers. For example, in my piece in 2010 “Timeproject,” we used ‘energy-harvesting technologies’ (Sneakers that captured energy in a tiny battery in the shoe).

The body itself is a kind of technology—the original technology, if you will—with its own complex systems and intelligence. When I bring technology or research into my work, I’m looking for that friction point where the organic and the digital create something neither could achieve alone…it’s about creating a dialogue between different forms of knowledge.

Tell us more about POESIS, which premiered last month at Melbourne’s Dancehouse, how did it unfold?

I worked closely with the dancers, all highly skilled and at the peak of physical intelligence through proprioception. We expanded our proprioception into other animals’ umwelts. There’s a section where I use boxing gloves to investigate a slow physicality with the other dancer in pointe shoes, another modulated way of experiencing dance and the world, without the ultimate freedom of the hand or the foot. We used extreme heels (one of the dancers was skilled in burlesque and drag and snow boots – which are antithetical as they are soft and fluffy- translating and augmenting textures in the body. POESIS in ancient Greek means to create something new, and I hoped this to be a compelling and engaging work, exploring new ways that plural bodies can work through umwelt, embracing the idea of difference and how we might relate to each other’s differences with curiosity rather than hostility. I’m interested in empowering the dancing body – in dance history there has been a lot of body fascism – I’m interested in virtuosity however it forms. That means ways of seeing things and ways of sensing encompassing neurodiversity and finding people’s super sensory powers.

You spent several years working with William Forsythe’s Ballet Frankfurt. How did that experience shape your approach to movement?

Working with Forsythe was transformative. What I value most from that time was learning to question everything—to never accept inherited conventions without examining them. Bill has this remarkable ability to deconstruct classical forms while honoring their complexity. He taught me that innovation doesn’t mean rejecting tradition but rather understanding it deeply enough to transform it.

The rigorous analytical approach we developed there has definitely influenced my work, though I’ve taken it in my own direction. I became fascinated with systems of movement that aren’t hierarchical—where there isn’t a single “correct” way to move but rather a field of possibilities. This democratic approach to movement continues to inform how I work with dancers, treating them as co-creators rather than just interpreters.

Your recent works have explored ecological themes. Can you talk about how environmental concerns manifest in your choreography?

The ecological crisis is fundamentally about relationships—how we relate to other species, to resources, to time itself. Dance is uniquely positioned to explore these relationships because it deals directly with bodies in space, with weight, effort, and cooperation.

In my recent work, I wanted to create movement systems that mirrored natural processes—patterns of growth, decay, and interdependence. The dancers work with principles derived from mycelial networks and ecosystems. We developed a score where no single dancer could succeed without attunement to the others, creating a kind of choreographic ecosystem.

I’m not interested in illustrating environmental issues literally on stage—that often becomes didactic. Instead, I want to create experiences that allow audiences to feel different ways of being in relationship with their surroundings, to temporarily inhabit different modes of attention and care. The body can understand things that the rational mind sometimes struggles with.

Many dancers speak about the challenge of documenting ephemeral art forms. How do you approach archiving your work?

This question of documentation is something I’ve grappled with throughout my career. Video never quite captures the lived experience of dance—the energy in the room, the subtle shifts of weight, the breath. And yet, without documentation, so much knowledge is lost.

I’ve come to see documentation not as an attempt to preserve the work intact but as a different manifestation of the creative process. I’ve always loved film and was deeply influenced by the Nouvelle Vague and European cinema while living in France and Germany. Feminist filmmakers like Agnes Varda, Tracey Emin and Judy Chicago have really inspired my practice and I see artforms as best when they are porous, when we as artists can explore between genres.

How do you begin a new work? Could you walk us through your creative process?

Each work begins differently, but there’s usually a question or problem that I find myself returning to obsessively. Sometimes it’s a quality of movement I’ve noticed in everyday life, sometimes it’s a more abstract concept I want to explore physically.

I start with research—reading widely, collecting images, having conversations with people from different disciplines. I need to saturate myself in the conceptual world of the piece before entering the studio. Then comes a period of physical investigation, usually working alone initially—improvising, filming myself, refining specific movement ideas.

When I bring dancers into the process, I share the conceptual framework but try not to prescribe outcomes. I give tasks or problems rather than specific movements. What interests me is how different bodies interpret the same instructions, finding solutions I couldn’t have imagined. There’s an alchemy that happens in the studio—the piece reveals itself gradually through this collective investigation.

The final stage involves structure and dramaturgy—finding the arc of the work, making decisions about duration, repetition, intensity. This is where my outside eye comes in, stepping back to consider how the audience will experience the journey of the piece.

Contemporary dance can sometimes feel inaccessible to audiences unfamiliar with its codes. How do you think about accessibility in your work?

I think about this question constantly. I have no interest in making work that speaks only to those already fluent in the language of contemporary dance. At the same time, I don’t want to underestimate audiences or simplify complex ideas.

For me, accessibility isn’t about making work easier to understand in a literal sense—it’s about creating multiple entry points. I think about layering meaning so that someone with no dance background can connect with the sensory experience, the emotional resonance, while someone with more context might also engage with the formal or historical references.

I’ve found that providing thoughtful context—whether through program notes, pre-show talks, or post-performance discussions—can make a huge difference. Not to explain the work away, but to offer tools for engagement. I also believe in the intelligence of the body—audiences can understand much more through their kinesthetic sense than we sometimes give them credit for.

What advice would you give to emerging choreographers finding their voice?

First, I’d say be patient with yourself. Finding your choreographic voice takes time and involves many detours. Don’t be afraid to make work that doesn’t quite succeed—those “failures” often contain the seeds of your most distinctive contributions.

Study widely, both within and beyond dance. Your unique perspective will come from the particular constellation of influences you bring together. Pay attention to what genuinely fascinates you, not what you think you should be interested in.

Develop rigorous practices that help you access your creativity consistently, rather than waiting for inspiration. For me, this includes daily movement practice, writing, and drawing—activities that keep me in conversation with my creative impulses.

Finally, build community. Choreography can be isolating, and we need trusted collaborators who can give honest feedback and support. Find the people who challenge you to be clearer and braver in your work, and nurture those relationships.

Looking ahead, what directions do you see dance moving in over the next decade?

I see several exciting trajectories emerging. There’s a growing interest in interdisciplinary collaboration—not just as a novelty but as a serious methodology for creating new forms. The boundaries between dance, visual art, music, and technology are becoming increasingly permeable.

I’m also encouraged by the current reckoning with whose bodies and perspectives have historically been centered in contemporary dance. We’re seeing more diverse aesthetic frameworks being valued and more pathways opening for artists from backgrounds previously marginalized in our field.

The pandemic forced us to reconsider what constitutes “liveness” and how dance exists in digital spaces. Rather than seeing this as a poor substitute for in-person performance, I think we’re developing sophisticated ways of creating work specifically for digital dissemination, with its own aesthetic possibilities.

And finally, I see a return to dance’s communal roots—work that actively engages communities, that exists outside traditional performance venues, that responds to urgent social questions. Not all significant dance happens on a proscenium stage with ticketed audiences, and I think we’ll continue to see the field expand in these more participatory directions.

Finally, what are you working on currently that excites you?

I’ll be exploring POESIS a little more, hoping to look towards remounting and touring the piece. At the same time, I’m creating a short work for The Australian Ballet school, which blends pointe work and techno music. I am loving how empowering it is for the young women in the ensemble, and how fierce their practice is becoming,

Leila Lois

Leila Lois is a dancer and writer of Kurdish – Celtic origin based in Naarm/ Melbourne.

poema

Prue Lang — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 10:45:04 +0000

A film by Prue Lang

Performers: Jana Castillo, Amber McCartney, Tara Jade Samaya

Choreography: Prue Lang in collaboration with Jana Castillo, Amber McCartney, Tara Jade Samaya

Cinematography: Pippa Samaya

Editing: Prue Lang & Pippa Samaya

Music: Chiara Costanza

We respectfully acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land on which this was filmed, the people of the Kulin nations. We pay our respect to their Elders, past, present and future. We recognise their continuing connection to land, waters and culture.

This project was supported by City of Melbourne and the Australia Council for the Arts.

POESIS

Prue Lang — Sat, 28 Jun 2025 06:37:51 +0000

Sensing the world to recreate it.

POESIS is a new choreographic work by Prue Lang created in collaboration with performers Tara Jade Samaya and Benjamin Hancock. Developed through the concept of counterpoint, the piece draws inspiration from biomimicry, physical intelligence, mythology, and philosophy.

At its core, POESIS explores the evolution of perception—how the sensory worlds of animals and humans shape our kinaesthetic experience and understanding of reality. Dance, as embodied intelligence, becomes a means to heighten perception and foster new encounters with the world.

Through a series of choreographic acts, the work investigates poesis—the act of bringing something new into being—foregrounding the unseen and amplifying how motion can deepen sensory awareness. The performance unfolds across shifting states of intensity and attention, ranging from subtle to fierce, and from intuitive to conceptual.

Grounded in the belief that expanding human perception toward that of other species is a vital act of ecological consciousness, POESIS invites audiences to experience a dynamic dialogue between movement, sensing, and environment.

https://vimeo.com/1116543522

Choreographer: Prue Lang
Performers: Tara Jade Samaya & Benjamin Hancock
Music: Chiara Costanza, Tchaikovsky, Recordings Whale Song
Lighting designer: Lisa Mibus
Costume Designs/Construction: Prue Lang, Andrew Treloar, Benjamin Hancock
Producer: Viviana Sacchero

Photos: Pippa Samaya

POESIS has been commissioned by The Keir Foundation, supported through a Studio Residency with The Australian Ballet, and presented by Dancehouse Melbourne. Studio support from Chunky Move, Lucy Guerin Inc. and Dancehouse.

Choreography meets neurodiversity in this solo show.

Prue Lang — Thu, 15 Jun 2023 02:41:09 +0000

★★★★ 1/2 STARS Dance review: CASTILLO, Dancehouse

Choreography meets neurodiversity in this solo show.

Leila Lois – ARTSHUB, March 2022

CASTILLO is an athletic, sensory, playful collaboration between choreographers Prue Lang and Jana Castillo, performed as a solo by the latter at Dancehouse, an institution for cutting-edge dance in Melbourne. It throbs with highly controlled, technically difficult dance (from ballet to breakdance), an electric soundtrack that surges over the audience, and video projections that engross and perturb.

The piece set out to explore the themes of neurodiversity, sensory experience and changing modalities of expression. The overall effect of watching the show was thrilling and existential, gaping at the physical prowess of Castillo dancing en pointe in the first segment, with feline animation in the second and smooth urban acrobatics in the final part. The physical and emotional dexterity of the performance was astounding, as a wide variety of styles and emotional registers filtered through Castillo’s body, rippling over the audience like bullet time.

The video projections, by Prue Lang, Pippa Samaya and Takeshi Kondo showed the meticulous manufacture of pointe shoes, followed by a breathlessly strong adage by Castillo, where she turned and vaulted around the stage, her feet often in parallel and gaze out to the audience as if observing herself in the mirror.

The second videography was an extreme close-up of the elements: flowers in the wind, skin and hair bathed in sunshine, waves lapping at sea groynes and insects crawling; the minutiae of the detail at once beautiful and disturbing. The extreme immersive effect was compounded by a disjointed soundtrack by composer Chiara Costanza, with chimes, buzzing and thunder.

Castillo emerged as the spotlight revealed her on stage in butterfly pose on a sheepskin mat, curling out of the position with cat-like nimbleness. Her body seemed to ripple and melt like putty, she moved fluidly like a video in reverse, leading into the next section of projections, an ASMR clip of hands squishing putty.

The final movement of the choreography was nothing short of thrilling, as heavy industrial music and Castillo’s precise robot-like movements fluxed into break-dancing (some of the best I have ever seen). The soundtrack skipped through such old school hits as ‘Ice Ice Baby’ by Vanilla Ice and the audience was roused to whooping, cheering and gasping. Castillo absolutely captivated the eye with her virtuosity through the entire performance; it was hard, if not impossible to look away for a second.

The last song, ‘Girl on Fire’, summed up the performance. We were witnessing a dancer in her absolute prime, dancing with every vigorous fibre of her being and so completely lost in the moment. It was compelling and life-affirming to witness. It seems superfluous to mention but also important that Castillo was performing following a back injury that meant she couldn’t dance in an earlier, scheduled show. Truly she is a force. Such a wonderful synergistic creation from two of Australia’s most exciting choreographers, Prue Lang and Jana Castillo, a privilege to watch.

https://www.artshub.com.au/news/reviews/dance-review-castillo-dancehouse-2535457/

FOOT WORK Pointes, Socks and Sneakers in Prue Lang’s CASTILLO

Prue Lang — Thu, 15 Jun 2023 02:36:04 +0000

FOOT WORK

Pointes, Socks and Sneakers in Prue Lang’s CASTILLO

Gracia Haby – FJORD REVIEW March 2022

The sole is stamped with the maker’s mark, the size, and the width of the shoe. The sole is attached to the last with a staple gun, then using the relevant sized upper, the shoe is pulled over the last, the toe is pinned, and the upper is stapled to the seat of the last. This is followed by a combination of paste, hessians and cards to build up the block, depending upon the dancer’s specifications. This is how Freed of London make their bespoke pointe shoes, and this behind-the-scenes process is how Prue Lang’s “Castillo” begins.

Projected on a screen in Sylvia Staehli Theatre of Dancehouse, the over-the-shoulder camera view of the process of pleating the shoe tightly around the last, tying it down, opening for the sole channel and removing any excess material before it can be stitched is not just the craft before the dance, but its own meticulous dance. On the factory floor, this work is precise, to ensure the shoe and the foot work as one. After being stitched, the staples are removed and the shoe is cut down ready for turning. The insole is pasted in and the shoe is turned, put back on the last, and the maker shapes the shoe, performing an initial ‘bang out.’ To finalise the shape of the footwear, the shoe is shaped with a polished hammer, and the insole from earlier is inserted, and the reshaping process is repeated. It is physical work, as the shoe is put through its steps, which is not dissimilar to the steps it will be put through once used, either in class, rehearsal, or on stage.

The synergy between the maker and the dancer, in the opening eight-minute film,¹ and the choreographer, Lang, and the performer Jana Castillo in “Castillo” is not dissimilar either. Lang is interested in exploring the “taxonomy of touch and texture through the lens of choreography and neurodiversity”²and is doing so by inviting us to look at three different types of footwear: pointe shoes, socks, and sneakers.

Just as overnight, the pointe shoes are left in an oven at 80°C before heading to the finishing room to be neatly bound, tacked down, when requested, and socked, Lang has sought to fuse together the “complex art of [all areas of] dance making and embodiment.” Where does one end and the other begin?

When the stage lights come on and I see Castillo, in her pointe shoes, all the better to grand jeté en avant, I see them knowing a sped-up version of what went into making them. I hear the sound of the blocks, left and right shoe conversing. I see the shoes as a glorious extension of her movements as Castillo in turn appears almost in conversation with them, marking time between phases, comparable to where earlier I saw the vamp, sides and back of the shoe marked for where they needed to be cut. Castillo’s movements echo the attachment of the elastic drawstrings in the binding. I see her teetering between being in control of the movement and seemingly led by the shoes themselves, as if it is Castillo who follows the direction of the shoes à la Vicky Page in The Red Shoes (1948).

As Castillo herself explains in Perspective Shift (Episode #3: Jana): “Certain work environments will say that they are all inclusive, but they tolerate you, they don’t accept you, and that’s huge, that’s huge, because you can tell the difference. I felt like if I was a bit “ticky,” or a bit dystonic, I had to apologise. I had to remove myself from situations.”³ “Castillo” is Lang with Castillo, not for. And the emphasis on the ‘with’ is felt. Together they have shaped an “innovative visual-musical journey that celebrates physical intelligence and difference and stimulates new perceptions of the dancing body.”⁴ Together, with a small team, including composer Chiara Costanza, and video by Pippa Samaya and Takeshi Kondo (in addition to Lang), and lighting design by Lisa Mibus, Castillo in “Castillo” is a tactile exploration of “an artist living and thriving with disability.”⁵

In the second film, we move to the natural world, up close. Zoomed in on the details, someone’s head of short wet hair could almost read as a forest of spikey trees. A black and white dog’s torso and hind leg, also momentarily ‘something other’. This reinvention of the known material is what transpires in the movements of Castillo that follow. Things are revealed in a new light in the choreography. This is what the ringing notes of a Bellbird might look like as they cascade through the human body. Castillo traces their gentle procession through her limbs, one hand hovering just above the sound as it chimes its way through her body. I picture a furry green energy, imperceptible to the human eye. Adjusting to the low light, when Castillo appears on the small animal hide, her black-socked feet look almost like the limbs of a domestic cat or dog in a contented stretch.

From movements that express how stones in a creek bed feel to the sole of the foot we arrive at sneakers, artificial light, and manufacturing. In the third short film, a prosthetic right arm and torso tries to connect with the pelvis and legs, severed just below the knee joints, and the space in between what is typically connected, the disconnect, is uncomfortable. What I at first marvelled at — how little it takes to ‘animate’ and make real the unreal — quickly tipped over to feelings of sadness as I viewed a ‘broken’ body, writhing and helpless. The right and left knee joints sought to push the body back together again. Spliced between this visual, hands pull at gum-like, flesh-pink, rubbery dough. It was hard not to read this as the cause of the effect: a squishing of the guts, of the vulnerable internal organs, that lead to a failure to stand. Yet, perhaps, like a micro view of hair that, to me, looked like a forest, this ‘ink blot’ test was something more playful to someone else. Cropped below the knee, you; severed, me. Perhaps someone else reminisced about Play-doh, while another person saw the liberation a prosthetic limb can grant. Perhaps another was in awe of the multidirectional movement and rotation that is the ball-and-socket joint. Indeed, Castillo’s movements in the third response are playful, performative, and nostalgic as fragments of Vanilla Ice’s Ice Ice Baby (1990) ripple through her form, making her limbs liquid one moment, robotic the next, and a warm smile takes over her face. The audience whoops and cheers. “Flow like a harpoon daily and nightly/“Will it ever stop?” Yo, I don’t know/Turn off the lights and I’ll glow/To the extreme/I rock a mic like a vandal/Light up a stage and wax a chump like a candle”.

Like a poem in which line breaks shape meaning, Castillo’s poetic enjambments make multiple interpretations possible, and a warm smile takes over my face.

“The Making of a Freed of London Classic Pointe Shoe” video filmed by Freed’s in their London factory, uploaded 25^th January, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zExmSmO35Q, accessed March 4, 2022.

Prue Lang, Choreographer’s Note, “Castillo,” Dancehouse, https://www.dancehouse.com.au/whats-on/castillo-prue-lang/, accessed March 4, 2022.

“Perspective Shift: Season 1, Episode 3, Jana,” SBS, December 2019, https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/video/1633420355610/perspective-shift-s1-ep3-jana, accessed March 4, 2022.

Lang, Choreographer’s Note, “Castillo,” Dancehouse, 2022.

“The Journey so far,” Jana Castillo’s bio, https://www.janacastillo.co/about, accessed March 4, 2022.

https://fjordreview.com/prue-lang-castillo/

CASTILLO

Prue Lang — Wed, 14 Jun 2023 01:24:35 +0000

Winner BEST PERFORMER Green Room Awards 2023

CASTILLO is new dance performance sparked by an artistic synergy between Prue Lang and Jana Castillo. The work explores the taxonomy of touch and texture through the lens of choreography and neurodiversity.

CASTILLO danced and described via Pointe Shoes, Socks & Sneakers, exploring friction and texture to generate diverse and nuanced choreographic modalities. Each choreographic investigation is framed by a film, giving the spectator further insight into the complex art of dance making and embodiment. The film and live elements are interwoven to a score by renowned composer Chiara Costanza. CASTILLO is an innovative visual-musical journey, both poetic and virtuosic, that celebrates physical intelligence and difference and stimulates new perceptions of the dancing body.

Jana Castillo has an extra-ordinary physical intelligence and rigor due to her disability (Dystonia) and particular sensibilities due to Autism (ASD). Whilst these are invisible on stage, they are highly present in the rehearsal room and in daily life, making her a strong advocate for more inclusive dance practices. This work embraces her neurodiversity and difference, as we fully adapt the working process to her needs.

We also offer a public Q&A about the project should the venue be interested.

CASTILLO (Video Excerpt)

Concept & Direction: Prue Lang

Choreography: Prue Lang and Jana Castillo

Performer: Jana Castillo

Composer: Chiara Costanza

Lighting designer: Lisa Mibus

Video: Prue Lang, Pippa Samaya, Takeshi Kondo androids: Mathieu Briand

Producer: Alison Halit

Photos: Anne Moffat

This project is funded and supported by The Australia Council for the Arts, Creative Victoria, Besen Family Foundation, Supercell Festival of Contemporary Dance through the Makers program, Chunky Move, Dancehouse, Lucy Guerin Inc.

We offer a public Q&A about the project should the venue be interested. CASTILLO will also have a further iteration as a tactile-audiodescription for visually impaired audiences to more fully experience dance. This will be presented online with the textural elements sent to participants, in collaboration with Fayen d’Evie & Hillary Goidell.

18-20 January 2024 Theatre National de Chaillot, FRANCE

3-5 March 2022: Dancehouse Melbourne, AUSTRALIA.

15-17 June 2022: Rencontres Choreographiques Internationales de Seine-Saint-Denis, FRANCE.

19-20 August 2022: InDANCE Sydney Dance Company, Sydney, AUSTRALIA

PROJECT F

Prue Lang — Mon, 11 Mar 2019 23:05:12 +0000

Winner BEST CHOREOGRAPHY Green Room awards 2022

DATES:

Saturday 29 Feb 2020, 9pm: Abbotsford Convent, Melbourne AUSTRALIA
Sunday 1 March 2020, 9pm: Abbotsford Convent, Melbourne AUSTRALIA
Monday 2 March 2020, 9pm: Abbotsford Convent, Melbourne AUSTRALIA

13 May 2020, 7pm: Rencontres Chorégraphiques Internationales de Seine-Saint-Denis FRANCE
14 May 2020, 7pm: Rencontres Chorégraphiques Internationales de Seine-Saint-Denis FRANCE

16 May 2020: New Baltic Dance Festival, Vilnius LITHUANIA
17 May 2020: New Baltic Dance Festival, Vilnius LITHUANIA

PROJECT F is a kinaesthetic engagement with feminism, felt via a particular focus on female figures from 12th century until now. It uses the parallel stories and music from historic and modern day trailblazing women – Hildegard von Bingen (b. 1102) and Princess Nokia (b.1992) – as provocations to explore notions of feminist utopia, in choreographic terms. PROJECT F is created with an all-female team (choreographer, performers, composer, designers, producer, dramaturg etc.) to illuminate outstanding achievements by Melbournian women. We are diverse in age and background, yet all with feminist concerns and a strong aspiration to present positive and powerful female role models for broad audiences. At the heart of this investigation is the shared experience of the human body from a celebratory female perspective and through women’s bodies.

Abbotsford Convent is a precinct with a diverse history and association with women. From 1863 to 1975, thousands of girls and women in need were placed in care at the Convent, with many labouring in the onsite Magdalen Laundries where the premiere will take place. The synergies between PROJECT F’s investigation and the Convent precinct provides a layered and textual context for experiencing this presentation.

PROJECT F – Video excerpts

PROJECT F Creative team:

Concept and Direction: Prue Lang
Choreography: Prue Lang in collaboration with the performers
Performers: Jana Castillo, Amber McCartney, Lauren Langlois, Niharika Senapati
Composer: Chiara Costanza
Creative Adviser: Dr. Philipa Rothfield
Lighting Designer: Jenny Hector
Costume Designer: Karine Larché-Ndour
Producer: Alison Halit

Photos: Amelia Ducker

PROJECT F is a supported by the Australia Council for the Arts, Creative Victoria, City of Melbourne, City of Yarra, Abbotsford Convent, Dancehouse, Chunky Move, Lucy Guerin Inc / WXYZ Studios and the Victorian College of the Arts.

New Breed review: Always worth seeing, this year filled with surprises

Prue Lang — Mon, 10 Dec 2018 03:42:07 +0000

New Breed review: Always worth seeing, this year filled with surprises

By Jill Sykes

2 December 2018

★★★★

Carriageworks, November 29

Two intriguing surprises lift this year’s New Breed– emerging choreographers working with members of the Sydney Dance Company – from its customary worth-seeing category into the unexpected: a world of the imagination.

In Towards Innumerable Futures, Prue Lang explores a time when artificial intelligence could take over the human race: would human skills of interaction, empathy and touch win out?

Robotic striding around in strict lines by one of its five performers is contrasted with couples often dancing as one, with entwined limbs, or in perfect opposites like an animated Rorschach blot. Interruptions to the couples are constant, by as little as finger contact, more likely by a shoulder or full body intervention as individuals mix and match in an absorbing jigsaw of ideas and actions.

Neat costumes by Aleisa Jelbart, topped by black or white pageboy wigs, add to the atmosphere built by precise performances and an original soundtrack by Chiara Kickdrum.

Holly Doyle describes her Out, Damned Spot! As “modernised mimicry of the ritualistic, repetitive and cathartic practice of cleansing”. She wraps her five performers in head-to-foot transparent suits (talented designer Aleisa Jelbart again) for their tasks.

They arrive in a tight-knit jogging group, chanting like ancient primates (original sound by Dane Yates) before breaking out into their “cleansing” activities. These become more intense and more complex choreographically as time goes on.

It is another bold journey into the imagination in which Izzac Carroll, Nelson Earl, Chloe Leong, Jesse Scales and Charmene Yap provide not only the dancing skills but a deliciously straight-faced presentation of the theme.

Between these bookend works are two more conventional pieces, also with original music. Janessa Dufty looks to the waratah for inspiration for her Telopea, in which a closely wrought male quartet is initially a quintet with Ariella Casu, who finishes up holding the stage alone in a beautiful solo. Composer Tobias Merz sings his evocative music live.

Mother’s Cry by Katina Olsen brings six women together in a gently flowing essay on looking back on life and how we treated our mothers. It is nicely crafted but not distinctive.

Until December 8.

Towards Innumerable Futures

Prue Lang — Mon, 10 Dec 2018 02:53:34 +0000

A Commission by SYDNEY DANCE COMPANY as part of New Breed 2018.

Imagine the present era is over. Some predict future humans will be aided, guided and minded over by artificial intelligences, super-capturing their lives, pointing them in useful directions, engineering their serendipity, personalising their remote presence, hapticsizing their intimacy and keeping them constantly switched on to networks. Others predict future humans will prize disconnection in the same way we seek out Wi-Fi, and the skills of deep human interaction, empathy, physical touch and the innate sensing of what other people are thinking or feeling will be the most valued in their societies.

This work places the body at the heart of this investigation.

Choreography: Prue Lang

Music: Chiara Costanza

Costume Design: Aleisa Jelbart

Lighting Design: Alexander Berlage

Performers: Ariella Casu, Holly Doyle, Izzac Carroll, Charmene Yap, Victor Zarallo

Photos: Pedro Grieg

Commissioned by SYDNEY DANCE COMPANY as part of New Breed 2018.

Co-presented by Carriageworks and Sydney Dance Company – with the generous support of The Balnaves Foundation.

Stellar project – Claudia La Rocco

Prue Lang — Wed, 29 Aug 2018 10:54:43 +0000

Dance Massive 2017 by Claudi La Rocco

It’s quite a thing to fly 18 hours; parachute into a continent, country, city, scene for a week; see almost 10 performances over the course of that week; and come out the other end with anything intelligible (never mind intelligent) to say.

As of this typing I’ve done all but the intelligible bit. What to say about Dance Massive?

STELLAR PROJECT

Talk is tricky. I think the transition from dancers being dancers to dancers being people in a dance situation, indicated by them bursting into discussion with each other about what they are doing, is maybe impossible to pull off. I think that might be part of the attraction to it: …can I make this work? Can I solve this human problem choreographically?

This first break comes early in Stellar Project; it’s jarring, the first of several shifts Prue Lang presents us with, making it an audience problem as well: will we assimilate this lurch into self-consciousness? Will we resist? I do the latter first, and then at some point I realize I’ve uncrossed my arms.

Lang gives us the ensemble as exquisite body: if I move my arm here, if you shift your weight there — the communication is flawless, and utterly opaque; it’s only if you don’t need specifics that you get answers. The fluidity and precision in the strongest of her performers is inarguable: a last word that will never say itself. And then come the words that we all should understand, the specifics that of course only get us so far. How can these two realms of being sit with each other, or at least jostle alongside? This is also the big question in criticism (and art is always its best critic).

Stellar Project is the only work I see twice. The first night I am too overcome by heat and tired and show fatigue to stay with it. The second night I sit in the front row, and everything is immediately clearer. Ceaseless permutations of bodies. Negotiation. A final circle of darkness over light, like an eclipse. An arm striking upward, striking through.

What is contemporary dance. The eventual answer I stumbled toward, the only sensible answer I can ever think of: it’s just how artists are working today; all the variations one might think of, and more.

Claudia La Rocco

Stellar Project review: Dancers look to the skies for answers in work with universal themes

Prue Lang — Wed, 29 Aug 2018 10:45:46 +0000

Stellar Project review: Dancers look to the skies for answers in work with universal themes

SYDNEY MORNING HERALD / THE AGE

Imagine creating a dance about the universe. Do you begin with science – complex mathematical equations and theories – or with philosophy, art, the human body – or even, perhaps, the daily horoscopes – for guidance?

Prue Lang’s new work Stellar Project touches on all of these themes. As with her previous work in this series (2015′s Spaceproject), Stellar Project is a work that digs into what we do not understand from many angles and perspectives.

This complexity of intention lends itself to contemporary dance quite well, and the movement that Lang has developed for her five dancers exploits the fact that dance can be many things at the same time, and perhaps – like our universe – be many things that we simply do not have the language to describe.

Mark Pederson’s sound design draws initially on the familiar noise of city life. Sirens wail and birds chirp as the dancers’ focus is drawn repeatedly up to the sky above them. They seem to be looking beyond the clouds, and the score eventually charts the shift from known to undiscovered through its increasing abstraction.

The dancers (Mikaela Carr, Benjamin Hancock, Lauren Langlois, Amber McCartney, Harrison Ritchie-Jones) play what seem like parlour games, shouting out the “answers” as a way to assign meaning to the movement, as though reciting from Wikipedia. Here it is as though Lang is drawing attention to the fact that our understanding is insignificant and, quite frankly, inadequate.

Stellar Project is ambitious in the ideas that it is grappling with, but it is presented in a way that makes the exploration and experimentation a visible scaffolding in performance. The dancers even wear tracksuit pants, as though to underline that our thinking is evolving and unresolved – this is a project under construction and still questioning its place in this world.

JORDAN BETH VINCENT

Orienting through Blindness: Blundering, Be-Holding, and Wayfinding as Artistic and Curatorial Methods

Prue Lang — Wed, 29 Aug 2018 09:51:52 +0000

Orienting through Blindness:

Blundering, Be-Holding, and Wayfinding as Artistic and Curatorial Methods

Handovers + Translations BY FAYEN D’EVIE

The building that houses Gertrude Contemporary’s Glasshouse gallery was constructed during the early years of the colonial settlement of Melbourne, on swamplands that would later become the inner-city neighbourhood of Collingwood. The original glassworks— proclaimed as the first in Victoria—closed mysteriously after just a few years. The building was taken over by a candle-making factory, which did not last long either, forced out by local protests over the fumes of boiling, rancid fat. (The conflict attenuated in an 1856 newspaper editorial “The Right to Be a Nuisance” that pilloried the owners’ defence of their right to stench the neighbourhood.) The building was then repurposed as a tannery and boot-making factory, which survived for several decades, until the chain of industrial occupation was ultimately disrupted by gentrification, culminating in the architectural renovation of the ground floor Glasshouse gallery. This history of handovers from one venture to another, with shifting inflections in material transformation and recurring tensions over the politics of space, reverberated in a performative exhibition that I initiated in late 2016 at Glasshouse, titled [...]{…}[...].

The exhibition was conceived as an experiment proceeding from blindness, one that would begin with artists with experience of blindness, and then evolve through a sequence of handovers of a mutating installation, amongst a complex web of collaborators and an intermittent public audience. When the first group of collaborators convened for the inaugural working session, the space was near empty, other than a collection of steel joints and poles and a temporary water bath, where sculptor Sophie Takách was soaking kangaroo rawhides. Artist-writer Troy McConnell and I initiated the session by mapping

the gallery, describing our perceptions of the tactility of the architecture, and temperature shifts as we moved around the space. Through assisted clenching and unclenching of his hands, McConnell then dropped the “Prologue to Handling” bronzes onto a damp hide attached with S hooks to a steel armature. He also clenched and unclenched a smaller scrap of rawhide, stained with tread marks from his wheelchair that McConnell had directed be pushed back-and-forth over top at rapid speed. This smaller scrap of leather fell to rest, dangling, about a steel joint. Throughout the sculptural process, McConnell and I sustained a descriptive conversation, while Takách hovered nearby, tightening or torquing steel joints, twisting hides, testing tensions, wetting and wringing skins. As we worked, sound artist Bryan Phillips recorded vocal utterances and the vibrations of materials as they were prodded/pinged/squelched/dragged, while photographer Pippa Samaya documented ephemeral moments of touch and handling.

After our bodies had been removed from the gallery, Phillips composed a sound work from the vibrational recordings of our sculpting process, responding to my provocation that we retrieve audiodescription as a generative artistic medium, rather than a post facto accessibility service. We installed the sound work with spatialised dynamics, mounting the left and right speakers at opposite ends of the gallery. Recall that Forsythe had referred to Morin’s translation of his topological manipulations, not only into sculptural form, but also into “the universal yet somewhat hermetic language of mathematics” (2011, 91). Language —whether inscribed, vocalised or codified—introduces a third site for manifesting choreographic idea-logics, triangulating the choreographic object and a body-in-motion. Thus, Phillips’ sound work not only introduced more complex sensory reverberations into the evolving installation, but could also be understood as a provocation for movement improvisations and choreographic thinking.

Offering the sound work in this context, we passed the gallery over to Prue Lang who had worked closely with Forsythe as a dancer and as a choreographer. She inherited a sparse installation: the vibrational audiodescription work; the sculptural assemblage from the first session, with joints locked to prevent structural collapse; an assortment of steel rods, joints, and hooks that could be used to extend the existing assemblage or to construct new armatures; and an expanded inventory of wet and dry rawhides. Lang worked with three professional dancers over several private sessions, listening to the audiodescription work, investigating the sculptural forms, and developing choreographic scores. Intermittently, Sophie Takách and I would adjust the installation, adding or subtracting steel poles, rewetting hides, expanding or contracting the range of torque, locking or releasing steel joints to alter the responsiveness of the installation. Note that prior to our handover to Lang, we had removed the “Prologue to Handling” bronzes from the gallery, but their presence was still palpable within the installation. The weight of the bronzes had deformed the damp rawhides, imprinting the volume of each bronze through simultaneous negative and positive casting, since each textured shape could be encountered from either side of its host hide. Like Morin’s description of space-like imagination, both the interior and the exterior surfaces of the objects could be handled at the same time. Volumes had been translated—literally—into tactile interior/exterior skins.

Rawhide had been proposed by Takách as a sculptural material partly in response to the historic use of Glasshouse as a tannery, but also because the rawhide is able to transition from a supple material, which diverse bodies can manipulate through micro or macro movements, to a rigid sculptural document of the labour, exertion, and physicality of handling. The steel armatures similarly echoed the site’s industrial past and functioned as a mutable skeletal structure. References to handovers and translations amongst

industrial/animal/human bodies reverberated through the development of Lang’s choreographic scores. As she later recalled,

I had been exploring the metal parts of the structure like they were my own joints—twisting, rotating, manipulating them with the resistance they required from my muscles—then in turn allowing these structural articulations to inform my body’s organisation and folding/unfolding/re- organising strategies … I tried to wrap/curl/slide my arms and fingers around and along the metal framework. I began to explore the ‘infrathin,’ that heightened state where the suppleness, elasticity and warmth of my own skin/body seemed to ‘meld’ with the rigid, cold, surfaces of the metal. From here I made a careful transition from the metal hook to the animal hide. My fingers absorbed the texture of this new material pulling and pushing the thickness of this other skin, recognisably different from my own. This other skin was dead—losing its cellular elasticity in a slow process of hardening, becoming brittle. I wanted to bring it back to life; manipulate it, pull it and push it until it became more malleable, compliant with my body, but also empathetic and complicit.

By the official opening of the exhibition—which represented the third phase of handovers, now to a public audience— Lang had developed a 20-minute choreographic score for four dancers. She invited the gathered crowd to sit or stand anywhere in the gallery space. The looped audiodescription work played in parallel, but was muted for a five-minute period during one sequence of the performance. Amongst those in attendance was Troy McConnell, who had returned to experience the evolution of the installation and the choreographed performance. Photographer Pippa Samaya had also returned to document the occasion. Her contributions introduce the problematic of handling images through blindness. Whereas a binary conception of blindness might disavow visual documentation altogether, I suggest that a less clichéd understanding of oculardiversity, more attuned to the complexity of blindness, may generate new methods of witnessing and archiving performance. Interlacing the theories of Roland Barthes, James Elkins, and Susan Sontag, photographic records are always fugitive, partial, and hallucinatory.6 From blindness, I propose that we can resist the ocularcentric conspiracy that endorses discrete photographic images as the dominant archival memory of an ephemeral performance. Through an epistemology of hallucination, photographic images can be approached not as documentary evidence, but as conversational prompts that may activate a thicker description of an ephemeral performance, by allowing for multiplicities of descriptive memories, counter-memories, and embodied re-readings.

Within [...]{…}[...], I experimented with transfiguring image description —a conventional accessibility strategy for blind audiences—as a discursive method. Consider the following descriptive texts from Prue Lang and Troy McConnell, who each chose an image to describe from the opening performance, out of a set of documentary images of relational contact and interaction from throughout the Glasshouse experiment. McConnell’s description took the form of a conversation with disability support worker Terry Foley.

Caption for an absent image. An ephemeral moment in the opening performance of {…}[...]{…}.Image description by Prue Lang: “I instructed the performers to focus on the materiality of the space. The metal, hook, hide, wall, floor, fabric, skin, flesh, hair… While we sensed the spectators in the space, an interaction between the spectator and the performer would only occur if the performer decided to extend their material investigation into the spectator (surface of a shoe, brushing of clothes, texture of hair, tracing a chair, sharing of a wall surface, etc). I eliminated communicating with the spectator through a text, eye contact or body language … The spectator was simply a part of the materiality of the space in which our physical thinking transpired.”]//

Caption for an absent image. An ephemeral moment in the opening performance of {…}[...]{…}.Image conversation between Troy McConnell and Terry Foley: “Troy is on the left of the picture sitting with the hide on the frame. There is a male dancer in a long sleeve, white top, dancing and laying on the floor, with his right arm extended on the floor above his head pointing. He has his left hand on his hip. There is a woman sitting on the floor, with her elbow resting on her knee, half cross legged and looking upwards. There is a person sitting on a chair against the far wall, with legs crossed and one hand in their lap. The person has their chin in their hand while their elbow rests on their knee.” Troy’s comment: “There is a spectator who looks from the body language that they are deeply pondering or may be judging. I was experiencing it from two points of view, as the artist and as the spectator, as the dancers moved around me.”]//

As the image descriptions infer, from the sensory perspective of the dancers the choreographic score deprivileged spectators, directing a material equivalence between human bodies, sculptural objects, and architectural textures. Yet, as implicated in Troy McConnell’s remarks, from the sensory perspective of the audience the choreographic performance reasserted spectatorship, even for those with blindness. At times, a foot could be heard scraping across a floor, or the thud of a dancer slumping against a wall, and some within the audience received a fleeting touch from a dancer, or experienced proprioceptive awareness of near contact. However, most of the performative movements—like the Forsythe manifestations—could only be apprehended visually. Earlier I proposed an inversion of the concept of accessibility, shifting to models that activate attentiveness and extend the movement vocabularies more broadly. For sighted onlookers, the opening performance certainly offered a glimpse of the intricacy and intensity of tactile and haptic intervention possible when moving attentively within the exhibition topology. But in the wake of the opening, a question vexed me: how could performative movements of one person (or group) be experienced by a second person (or group) in ways that would more radically displace spectatorship? Although this question is yet to be resolved, some possible wayfinding principles would emerge as the durational exhibition unfolded.

PERFORMANCE PARADIGM 13 (2017)

NGV Triennial

Prue Lang — Tue, 28 Aug 2018 11:32:10 +0000

A site-specific performance for the NGV Triennial 2018.

This performance was created specifically for and took place within the dynamic graphic and textile installation of American artist Pae White. It was part of Accumulation – a choreographic takeover of the NGV Triennial in collaboration with Chunky Move, with new performance works by Prue Lang, Anouk Van Dyke, Antony Hamilton and Thomas E. Kelly.

National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne 2018.

Photos: Pippa Samaya

Stellar Project

Prue Lang — Fri, 17 Aug 2018 02:13:00 +0000

STELLAR PROJECT explores dual concepts of cosmos and chaos, order and complexity, language and affect, the nameable and the ambiguous. Continuing Lang’s choreographic investigations of embodied and experiential perceptions of space and time, the work probes the duality and coexistance of these concepts. At the heart of the investigation is the shared experience of the human body; the body as living receptors, measurers and generators of our intellectual, spiritual and corporeal understandings of the Universe.

V I D E O – STELLAR PROJECT >

Choreography & concept: Prue Lang

Performers: Mikaela Carr, Benjamin Hancock, Lauren Langlois, Amber McCartney, Harrison Ritchie-Jones

Dramaturgical reflection: Rebecca Hilton

Lighting design: Jenny Hector

Sound design: Mark Pederson

Costume design: Fozia Akalo

Producer: Alison Halit

Supported by Dancehouse, Creative Victoria, Australia Council for the Arts, Besen Foundation, Lucy Guerin Inc., City of Melbourne, Maximised Chunky Move, VCA

Photos: Pippa Samaya

[...] {…} [...] Handovers + Translations

Prue Lang — Fri, 17 Aug 2018 01:10:39 +0000

Fayen d’Evie, Prue Lang, Troy McConnell, Sophie Takách

Handovers + Translations was a collaboration between choreographer Prue Lang, visual artist Fayen d’Evie, sculptor Sophie Takách and blind artist Troy McConnell. Throughout October 2016, Gertrude Glasshouse Gallery in Melbourne was the site for a series of trans-sensory and inter-material translations, accumulating as an evolving haptic exhibition:

//audio-description transfigured as generative, vibrational practice / movement improvisations / hide(s) / work — works — work sites / articulated armatures / materials under tension / skin(s) / boundaries of encounters / resistance / responsiveness / contraction and release / transmission from body to material, from material to body, from material to material, from body to body / scores for encounters between bodies and material histories / taxonomies of touch / imprints of contact / distributed authorship / activation / elasticity / vibrational silence / private handovers / public handovers / removal / retreat / return / repeat //

Performer-explorers: Prue Lang, Louella Hogan, Benjamin Hancock, Harrison Ritchie-Jones

Photos: Pippa Samaya

Spaceproject Prue Lang

Prue Lang — Tue, 05 May 2015 06:04:16 +0000

The Age / Sydney Morning Herald

Dance Massive review: Spaceproject takes on infinite and minute

From beneath a small table, a dancer speaks of the “post-modern apocalypse” and “an implosion of meaning”. In her program notes, choreographer Prue Lang refers to the human body as a medium for the comprehension of space and time, a notion both mathematical and emotional.

Lang employs complex movement to edge up to these thematic ideas, drifting through a seemingly random, and yet carefully curated collection of concepts as though she is stringing beads from one hundred different necklaces on a single thread. There is a sense that Lang is toying with us – daring us to cobble together a cohesive grasp of her processes and intentions when they might be deliberately obscured.

How we find our way (and indeed, how the dancers themselves find their way) is a recurring theme in Spaceproject, explored through gestures that inscribe connected loops, shared points of contact, or navigational references such as a compass. Taking on roles as poets and philosophers through to friends bickering during a bushwalk, the dancers embody these loops, points of contact and compasses, seeking moments of engagement with the space around them.

There is something generous about the movement in this work. Dancers (Lauren Langlois, Benjamin Hancock, Amber McCartney and James Batchelor) dive into movements that seem to be drawn from inspiration as varied as the expanse of our universe, or as insignificant as a mosquito bite.

Lang was a dancer with The Forsythe Company, and there is certainly something Forsythe-esque about her integration of ideas with movement, text and sound. However, Spaceproject offers a unique exploration of ideas, and is a fine addition to Dance Massive’s investigation of contemporary dance in its many forms.

Jorden Beth Vincent

Timeproject au Theatre National de Chaillot Paris

Prue Lang — Tue, 05 May 2015 06:00:56 +0000

Ancienne interprète de William Forsythe, Prue Lang développe son propre travail chorégraphique sous une forme originale et délicate. Concernée par l’environnement, l’artiste nous interpelle plus spécifiquement sur la question de la production d’énergie.

« Il n’y a qu’un seul élément de l’espace : le mouvement. » Cette définition de l’architecte et designer Frederick Kiesler donne d’emblée l’idée des recherches entreprises par Prue Lang. Ex-interprète et chorégraphe au sein de la célèbre compagnie de William Forsythe, l’artiste australienne a initié, en 2008, une démarche singulière. Dans Un réseau translucide, elle proposait « d’explorer un nouveau format de spectacle en intégrant des questions environnementales à la scène ». Cette pièce récupérait notamment sa propre énergie pour le son et les lumières. Première chorégraphe prônant une danse « verte » – ou la production d’éco-gestes au théâtre –, Prue Lang a investi son langage artistique du côté de l’expérimentation. Pour Timeproject, elle a développé un prototype de chaussures, grâce auxquelles l’énergie des danseurs est récoltée afin de produire de l’électricité. Dans cette pièce, la chorégraphe se consacre d’abord à l’analyse du temps, notamment dans sa relation à l’action. Telle une matière avec sa malléabilité, son élasticité, ce partenaire souvent méconnu de l’espace est le point d’origine de cette création où la chorégraphie se meut en système. Tel un lancer de dés, les actions déterminent la durée : le jeu transforme la danse et l’interprétation et les questionne à la fois. Car si le temps peut être considéré comme une donnée quantifiable, sa perception reste subjective et impalpable, notamment au théâtre, explique Prue Lang. Timeproject enquête sur ce mystère.

Irène Filiberti

Spaceproject

Prue Lang — Sun, 08 Mar 2015 10:25:38 +0000

Spaceproject is the partner piece of Timeproject

Suppose we saw a leaf falling from a tree.

The event “the leaf falls on the ground” can be characterized by its spatial coordinates three in number (eg 54 ° N latitude, 20 ° E longitude and 120 m above sea level) and the time coordinate (for example 29 April, 2013 at 1 h 27 min 43 s). The event could also be characterised by its movement qualities (for example a suspended fall, a series of curved inscriptions in the air, a fluttering, touch and settling, or being caught by the earth). As architect and designer, Fredrick Kiesler pointed out in his manifesto for stage space that embraced three- dimensionality: “There is only one space element: motion.” And if we map “motion”, it is against one axis representing space and one representing time. Timeproject (France 2013) was an investigation of movement through the perception of time. Spaceproject (Australia 2015) is the investigation of movement through the perception of space. Both these works have at their heart the human body; the body as living receptor, measurer and generator of understandings of space and time.

Concept & Direction: Prue Lang

Choreography: Prue Lang in collaboration with the dancers.

Performers: Lauren Langlois, Amber McCartney, Benjamin Hancock, James Batchelor

Texts: Lygia Clark, Brian Massumi, Deleuze and Guattari

Lighting: Danny Pettingill

Music: The cure, David Lang, Martial Solal

Sound edit: Maxwell Dowling

Supported by Arts Victoria, Besen Family Foundation, Dancehouse. Studio space at Chunky Move.

Presented at Dancehouse as part of Dance Massive Australia 2015.

Green guidelines for TIMEPROJECT

Prue Lang — Sat, 16 Feb 2013 13:51:08 +0000

Prue Lang et la compagnie s’engagent dans les lignes directrices suivantes dans le cadre de leur engagement à réduire leur empreinte écologique:

>Le spectacle se fera avec un minimum de personnes.

>Tous nos décors/ accessoires sont réduits à une petite valise de sorte qu’aucun transport supplémentaire n’est nécessaire.

>Si de plus grands accessoires sont nécessaires (par exemple table) ils seront trouvés sur le lieu de représentation.

>Nous allons voyager au maximum par train.

>Dans les rares cas où le vol est nécessaire, nous allons faire avec de la compensation carbone.

>Nous préférons voyager vers / depuis le lieu autant que possible, par les transports publics, vélo, ou à pied.

>Nous préférons disposer d’hôtels / hébergement à proximité du lieu à cette fin.

>Nous encourageons que l’éclairage de scène soit éteint y compris entre les répétitions/ sound-check et le temps du spectacle.

>Nous ferons de notre mieux pour éteindre toutes les lumières/ réchauffeurs / appareils électriques lorsqu’ils ne sont pas utilisés dans le lieu.

>Nous n’utiliserons pas de bouteilles d’eau en plastique. Nous apporterons nos propres bouteilles d’eau réutilisables.

>Nous sommes d’accord pour manger une restauration de produits locaux. Nous sollicitons des adresses de restaurants locaux, écoresponsable, bio ou végétarien dans la ville.

>Nous allons essayer de garder nos propres déchets et respecter la politique de recyclage mis en place dans le lieu.

>Notre publicité se fait principalement par courrier électronique et nous n’avons pas besoin d’affiches ou de cartes imprimées.

>Nous adoptons tous les dispositifs d’économie d’énergie, les dispositifs d’économie d’eau, la production du commerce équitable et les initiatives d’énergies alternatives qui peuvent être en place dans votre lieu.

Recommandations de réduire l’impact environnemental des activités de votre théâtre:

TRANSPORT

>Négocier avec les autres lieux de diffusions ainsi que les festivals, l’abandon de toute clause d’exclusivité géographique de manière à pouvoir organiser des tournées suivant une logique plus respectueuse de l’environnement.
> Dans toutes les communications sur vos spectacles, mettre en avant l’utilisation des transports en commun pour venir au théâtre et signaler les parcs à vélos accessibles autour. > Dans la mesure du possible, encourager la Compagnie à utiliser les transports en commun pour l’ensemble de leurs déplacements locaux, en vélo ou à pied.

> Encourager les salariés du théâtre de privilégier les transports en commun ou le vélo pour leur trajet domicile-travail.

ENERGIE

> Les éclairages du théâtre et du plateau seront éteints quand ils ne seront pas nécessaires, notamment entre les temps de balances, de répétitions et de spectacle.
> Les loges respecteront toujours une température agréable qui ne pourra excéder les 21°C (normalement 19 ° en France), sauf nécessité liée au spectacle. Investir dans les bonnes méthodes d’isolation pour réduire la perte de chaleur.

> Réfléchir comment l’électricité de votre théâtre provient en partie d’énergies renouvelables (contrat EDF)
> Privilégiant des équipements et matériels économes en énergies, notamment pour l’éclairage en utilisant des LEDS. Voir http://www.arcolaenergy.com

HEBERGEMENT

>Héberger les Compagnies dans les hôtels les plus proches du théâtre. Privilégier autant que possible les hôtels écolabellisés qui proposent un confort maximum tout en respectant l’environnement. e.g – Solar Hôtel Paris – http://www.solarhotel.fr

RESTAURATION

>Donner à la Compagnie une liste de restaurants du quartier qui travaillent avec des produits frais, de saison et dans la mesure du possible locaux.
>Organiser les repas sur place et toujours par des traiteurs privilégiant les produits biologiques, locaux et de saison.

DECHETS

> Mise en place du tri des déchets et des points de collecte. Les mettre en évidence pour vos salariés et la Compagnie.

CONSOMATION

>Utiliser uniquement du papier recyclé, papier toilette recyclé, produits ménagers écolabellisé etc. Privilégier les produits avec le moins d’emballage possible.

PUBLICITIE

>Privilégier un maximum la communication électronique par courriel. Réduire le nombre d’affiches, de cartes postales, de programmes/flyers.

Aider chaque compagnie à entrer dans la démarche et ainsi limiter l’impact environnemental des spectacles proposés!

Prue Lang and the company engage in the following guidelines as part of their on-going commitment to the environment:

>The performance will travel with the minimum amount of persons.

>All our stage decor /accessories are limited to a small suitcase so that no extra transport is necessary.

>If larger accessories are needed (e.g table) they will be found at the venue.

>We will travel by train whenever possible.

>In the rare case that flying is required we will compensate with carbon offsetting.

>We prefer to travel to/from the venue whenever possible, by public transport, bike or on foot.

>We prefer to have hotels/accommodation close to the venue for this purpose.

>We encourage stage lighting being switched off including between sound-check/technical rehearsal and performance time.

>We encourage switching off all unnecessary lights/heaters/ electrical devices when not being used in the venue.

>We will not require any plastic bottles of water. We will bring our own refillable water bottles to the venue.

>We agree to eat locally produced catering. We request addresses of local Eco-responsible, organic or vegetarian restaurants in the area.

>We will try to keep our own waste to a minimum and respect the recycling policy in place in the venue.

>Our publicity is done primarily via electronic mail and we do not require any posters or cards to be printed.

>We embrace all energy saving devices, water saving devices, fair trade production and alternative energy initiatives that may be coming into place in your venue!

Recommendations to reduce the environmental impact of your theatre’s activities:

TRANSPORT

> Negotiate with other venues and festivals to abandon any geographical exclusivity so that tours can be organized in a logic that is more respectful to the environment.

> In all advertising for your shows, highlight how to get to your venue using public transport give information about bike parks around the area.

> Wherever possible, encourage the company to use public transport, travel on bike of foot for all their local travel.

> Encourage employees to use public transport, travel on bike of foot to/from work.

ENERGY

> The lights in the theater and on stage will be turned off when they are not needed, especially in the time between rehearsals and performances.

> The dressing rooms will always respect a pleasant temperature not exceeding 21 ° C (19 ° normally in France), unless necessary for the show. Invest in proper methods of insulation to reduce heat loss.

> Consider how the electricity needed for your venue could come from renewable energy sources.

> Prioritize energy saving equipment and materials, especially LED lighting. See http://www.arcolaenergy.com

ACCOMMODATION

>Host companies in hotels that are closest to the theater. Prioritize any ecolabelled hotels which offer maximum comfort while respecting the environment. e.g – Solar Hotel http://www.solarhotel.fr

EATING

>Give the companies a list of local restaurants that use seasonal, local or organic produce whenever possible.

> Organize catering at the venue using caterers that favor organic, local and seasonal produce.

RUBBISH

> Put in to place waste sorting and recycling bins. Highlight these collection points for your employees and the companies.

CONSUMMATION

> Use only recycled paper, recycled toilet paper, Eco-labelled household products etc. Prioritize purchasing products with less packaging.

PUBLICITY

>Prioritize publicity via internet and electronic mail. Reduce the amount of posters, postcards and programs/flyers and when possible use recycled paper.

Help each company to enter into the process and to limit the environmental impact of their proposed performances!

Timeproject

Prue Lang — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 14:16:34 +0000

The question of time in dance continues to intrigue me.

Time is the unrecognized partner of the spatial and the intimate of the plastic. If there were only one element in the space it would be motion. And if we map “motion”, one axis represents space and the other represents time.

Since the invention of the mechanization of time and the consequent regulation of personal time, we operate on a chronometric time. This mechanical evaluation of time is based on the principle that time is a reflection of change – and essentially physical change. Whether this change be seasonal, the aging of a body or the revolution of a mechanized object, the main feature of this model is that time is quantifiable. Yet despite the synchronicity and linearity of time, its perception is wholly subjective and intangible. Theatre remains distinct in its shared time relationship between the audience and the performer. The complexity of the performer and the performance in time is specific to theatre, attainable because the truth of the situation – that a performance is occurring in the now – underlines all time frames other than ‘now’ as fictive; and as fictions they are malleable. This malleability of time, through a conscious process of examining the time relationship to action, is the departure point for this choreographic work.

Parallel to this, the performance provides an opportunity for the research and development of a prototype of “piezoelectric ” shoes in which the energy of the dancers can be harvested to produce energy. This project is accompanied by a ‘Green rider”, both for the theater and for the company, created in collaboration with Imagine 2020 Art and Climate change.

Conception, mise en scène Prue Lang

Chorégraphie Prue Lang en collaboration avec Douglas Bateman, Norbert Pape, Asha Thomas, Nina Vallon

Avec Douglas Bateman, Norbert Pape, Asha Thomas, Nina Vallon

Lumières Gilles Gentner

Prototype des chaussures récupération d’énergie Graffiti Research Lab

Coproduction Association PLANT / CDC Réseau / Festival Faits d’hiver / Théâtre National de Chaillot /

Avec le soutien du Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication – DRAC Ile-de-France / Fondation d’Art Oxylane

PARIS-ART Un réseau translucide

Prue Lang — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 19:32:30 +0000

Prue Lang
Un réseau translucide

MAINS D’OEUVRES

Alors que l’écologie et le développement soutenable prennent une place grandissante dans notre quotidien, comment le spectacle vivant et plus particulièrement la danse peuvent-ils s’approprier cet enjeu? La chorégraphe Prue Lang apporte sa réponse: une pièce dans laquelle l’énergie des interprètes est optimisée au-delà des «simples» mouvements dansés.

Des macarons produits localement seraient alignés sur le sol. Le sucre de ces friandises colorées alimenterait en énergie calorifique le corps de trois danseuses. Avalées goulûment, ces petites choses leur prodigueraient la force de pédaler à tour de rôle sur un vélo. La pièce chorégraphique dans laquelle elles évolueraient serait ainsi fournie en courant.

De prime abord, de telles idées pourraient paraître datées et/ou saugrenues. C’est sans compter sur l’ingéniosité scénique et chorégraphique de Prue Lang, danseuse et chorégraphe d’origine australienne en résidence à Mains d’Œuvres.

Dans cette pièce, l’énergie cinétique de trois interprètes féminines, dont la chorégraphe, est optimisée. Trônant en fond de scène, un vélo semble faire office de quatrième «interprète». Les trois danseuses l’enfourchent l’une après l’autre, pédalent encore et encore. Le courant produit éclaire le plateau. Des dispositifs techniques ingénieux sont par ailleurs intégrés aux costumes. L’énergie produite par les mouvements effectués alimente des batteries utilisables plus tard. Diffusant diverses chansons des années 80, le système sonore fonctionne d’ailleurs grâce à un précédent rechargement. Fonctionnant au courant électrique classique, la régie technique de Mains d’Œuvres (Lumières…) devient inutile et se retrouve mise au chômage… technique!

Qu’en est-il de la danse déployée? Elle se fait parfois saccadée, comme si elle était abritée d’une tension débordante, voire difficilement maîtrisable, mais néanmoins recyclable. À certains moments, la gestuelle aurait même tendance à devenir mécanisée. Comme un subtil écho à la mécanique en branle de la petite reine? Serait-ce l’utilisation des costumes-accessoires qui génère les mouvements? Ou à l’inverse, seraient-ce les mouvements prédéfinis qui auraient entraîné l’élaboration de ces peaux parées de technologie embarquée? Une confusion délicieuse règne.
Une frénésie chorégraphique peut évoquer une lutte féminine pour les macarons, en tant qu’ustensiles énergétiques essentiels pour pouvoir exister sur scène. Une main est brandie vers le haut – le ciel? — comme si l’interprète concernée voulait signifier son désir de vivre au-delà des difficultés scéniques du moment. Plus loin dans le déroulé de la pièce, les trois femmes cyborg peuvent au contraire donner l’apparence de chercher à s’apprivoiser.
D’aucuns peuvent y trouver la quête d’un «vivre ensemble» étroitement liée à la notion de développement soutenable.

Globalement, la pièce ne pâtit pas tant que cela des diverses contraintes découlant de l’option écologiste prise par la chorégraphe. Le pari d’un projet «visant à repenser les relations entre le corps et l’écologie» est presque relevé, malgré une impression de faiblesse à certains moments. C’est le cas, par exemple, pour ces arrêts répétés, rendus obligatoires pour laisser le temps à une danseuse de remplacer l’autre sur le vélo.Cette accumulation de noirs complets, aussi furtifs soient-ils, surcharge la pièce et lui enlève la fluidité qui semble lui faire défaut.

Présent dans les rangs du public, Daniel Favier, directeur de La Briqueterie/Centre de développement chorégraphique (CDC) du Val-de-Marne, relève le «côté très aventurier d’une telle pièce autonome d’un point de vue énergétique». À brûle-pourpoint, il estime que le projet de Prue Lang est «une recherche novatrice, dans la mesure où le concept environnemental est poussé jusqu’au bout: depuis l’élaboration en amont de la pièce jusqu’à sa création sur scène».

Dernier détail qui a son importance: la pièce s’intitule «Un réseau translucide». «Translucide» comme l’eau pure non polluée. «Translucide» pour signifier au spectateur-citoyen que rien ne lui est caché. «Réseau translucide» pour lui suggérer, peut-être, qu’il pourrait lui-même chercher à réduire son empreinte énergétique en s’incluant dans un réseau vertueux. De l’art dansé à l’écologie appliquée, il n’y a qu’un pas que Prue Lang s’est fait un plaisir de franchir. Avec une énergie renouvelable et renouvelée!

Par Valentin Lagares

— Conception: Prue Lang
— Chorégraphie: Prue Lang en collaboration avec Vanessa Le Mat et Nina Vallon
— Interprétation: Prue Lang, Vanessa Le Mat et Nina Vallon
— Conception du système lumière: Charles Goyard
— Conception des costumes: Amanda Parkes
— Construction des costumes: Aaron Crosby

Chorégraphe
— Prue Lang
D’origine australienne, elle est installée en Europe depuis 1999 où elle poursuit ses recherches chorégraphiques. Parmi les éléments saillants de son parcours, elle a notamment collaboré avec le chorégraphe William Forsythe au Ballet de Francfort.

The former Forsythe Star pedaled on a bicycle in order to generate power required for her “Sustainable Dance Performance”.

Prue Lang — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 13:09:16 +0000

Kultiversum

Dance is as inherently eco-friendly as the Formula 1, but for Prue Lang it is not enough. The former Forsythe Star pedaled on a bicycle in order to generate power required for her “Sustainable Dance Performance”.

Description: Consume energy, produce energy. With which goal? People want to live as long as possible. How they live is demonstrated by Prue Lang, Vanessa Le Mat and Nina Vallon in the completely wonderful “A translucent network” They run through a maze of imaginary rectangular railways and streets, in search of edibles. On the ground are macarons distributed like a chessboard. With deceptive plots, tricks and desires in angular, mechanical and even animalistic movements two women approach a macaron. Then it is swooped up. Or snatched away. Meanwhile the third woman pedals away at the generator in order to produce the sparse light.

Yet the eating produces energy and the dancing generates more energy. On their bodies, sewn into their costumes, are a series of batteries that are charged by their movements. They then provide the current of energy needed for the music in the next performance. The shrill costumes are by Amanda Parkes from New York, a designer experienced in crossing clothing with technology. Premiered in Paris, Prue Lang calculated precisely how many macarons corresponded to the energy spent in the performance. In Düsseldorf she will look for another biscuit. From local production not to use unnecessary energy. Thus please, do not go by the car to the performance!!

Assessment: Despite all constraints that they impose: the sinewy trio dance in no way into an eco-niche, but make figuratively tangible how the joys of living and everyday urban life can be brought into harmony. Kicking legs on a bicycle can in fact be splendid, not to mention their tactical dancing. “A Translucent Network” is the first creation in Lang’s Sustainable Dance Project and now gives a very strong desire for more. (Thomas Hahn)

World Premiere Season at the 2010 Adelaide Festival

Prue Lang — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 21:05:37 +0000

Australian stage

The 2010 Adelaide Festival will host the world premiere season of Frame and Circle – a masterful new two part production from South Australia’s award winning Leigh Warren & Dancers showcasing the talents of two of Australia’s most creative contemporary choreographers, Leigh Warren and Prue Lang.

Comprising two dance works – Rubicon (choreographed by Lang) and Meridian (choreographed by Warren) Frame and Circle will be presented at the Space Theatre (Adelaide Festival Centre) from 10–14 March 2010.

The production marks a homecoming for Paris based Lang and is the first time the two award-winning choreographers have worked in a program together.

“I’ve long admired Prue’s extraordinary abilities as both a dancer and choreographer and I was thrilled when she accepted my invitation to work on this new production,” says Warren. “It’s a unique event really – in that we have both individually created our own works but they are connected by the very nature of their contrasting subject matter. We also share many philosophical understandings about dance and improvisation techniques which stem from working at different times with the legendary choreographer, William Forsythe.”

An internationally acclaimed dancer in her own right, Lang is also the creative force behind some of the most ambitious choreographic works currently being made in Europe. Born in Melbourne, Lang was invited to France in 1996 to join Compagnie L’Esquisse and later joined Forsythe’s revolutionary Frankfurt Ballet (1999–2004).

Over the past five years, Lang has created numerous critically acclaimed productions including the multi-award winning performance installation Infinite Temporal Series (2006). Inspired by the writings of author and poet, Jorge Luis Borges, the series rose from Lang’s desire to create a concise yet dense format of performance, in which the complexity of an idea is explored over many years – so each work develops its own textual, perceptual and physical form, which is subsequently embedded in the next work.

Rubicon is the latest development away from Lang’s Infinite Temporal Series. For this new work, Lang has shifted her ‘frame’ of reference from a three dimensional perspective to exploring the framework within which games – be they sporting or board games are played.

“While Prue is using the concept of the ‘frame’ for her work, my piece is all about curves, intersections, arcs and orbits,” says Warren.

Taking its name from one of the imaginary longitudinal arcs circling the globe from north to south, Meridian sees Warren explore the links between his dancers’ innate sense of balance and the symbolism of the circle as it transcends space and time.

“Geometric, philosophical and unique ‐ the circle draws an invisible thread through the years that appears to connect key events in my life,” says Warren. “The circle has a significant place in mythology; from the standing stones of Stonehenge’s ‘time cycle’ to phrases like ‘the circle of life’. In the process of creating any dance, the composition of space and time form the building blocks of choreography.”

With a production team boasting two of Australia’s leading theatrical artisans – Mary Moore (set & costume design) and Margie Medlin (lighting design), Frame and Circle promises to engage, provoke and inspire audiences in this – its highly anticipated, world premiere season.

Dancers: Leigh Warren & Dancers

Choreographers: Prue Lang and Leigh Warren

Set & Costume Design: Mary Moore

Lighting Designer: Margie Medlin

Leigh Warren and Dancers

Frame and Circle

Adelaide festival review: Frame and Circle

Prue Lang — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 20:51:28 +0000

Adelaide Festival Review

From the outset, the staging of Rubicon draws you in. The square is Wimbledon green, with marking obscure/familiar enough to hint a game, a court, an arena, somewhere to do a structured battle.

And when the dancers come out to play they do so in the sort of languid time which allows our eyes to wander, our heads to move, following the intersections, rejections and connections that grace one then the other. In this way a landscape of interactions and their implications seeps into us.

Before long the spaces delineated become makeshift rooms where singles and couples lie as if depicting the passage of time or the give and take on the energy of life while half-serious duets and solos depict the consequences of what came before.

Throughout it, the soundtrack could not have been better chosen – the perfect mix to lure and lull us into the nether-world which these creatures inhabit. Bravo, Prue Lang –delightful.

In Meridian, Leigh Warren puts us into a simple white circle.

Leigh’s dancers run on, and work hard without any time seeming frenetic and out of our grasp, and the duets in the second part in particular show the sheer beauty of the choreography. Again you sit close enough to hear the footfall and breath of the piece – the extra gifts from this company and the closeness of these works.

Incredibly, the piece is occasionally lit with just one lantern – a sacred emphasis on pure form and shadow making the experience different for each one of the audience. This is an intimate space, and here we deal with intimate things – the orbits we find ourselves in, the need for touch, the end of it all.

Alexander Waite Mitchell’s score is again a highlight, the sort of atmospheric rendering that would come from the love child of Keith Jarret and Arvo Part. When it is all over, too soon, small pools of sweat remain as the only reminders of a night of beauty and meaning.

(Rob De Kok)

Un réseau translucide

Prue Lang — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 21:54:15 +0000

sustainable dance performance

We live without having to know that it requires a heart, organs, a whole labyrinth of tubes and wires, a whole living equipment of retorts and filters, by which an unending exchange can take place within us, between all the types of matter and all the forms of energy –from the atom to the cell, and from the cell to the visible and tangible masses in our body. Paul Valéry, Variété V

‘Honarary mention’ award in the PRIX ARS ELECTRONICA -Hybrid Art 2012

http://www.paris-art.com/spectacle-danse-contemporaine/un-reseau-translucide/lang-prue/7545.html

L’intégration des expérimentations écologiques dans un spectacle de danse -Table ronde :

1er décembre 2011, 18H00 – 19H30 Théâtre de la Ville, Paris

Investigating human activity as a renewable source of energy and re-thinking habitual modes of theatre production, Un reseau Translucide is an autonomous performance that runs 100% on its own energy. In collaboration with performers Nina Vallon and Vanessa Le Mat, and engineer-inventors Charles Goyard and Amanda Parkes, Un reseau Translucide is a work that poses the question ‘how could we make performances for the future?’ Developing a choreographic system in which the performers simultaneously generate the electricity, the work examines the relationship between the body and its environment, while opening up a dialogue on sustainable development in artistic practice.

Mains d’oeuvres, Saint-Ouen 30 September & 1 October 2011

Festival Faits d’hiver, Paris 21 & 22 January 2011

Tanzhaus NRW, Düsseldorf 29 & 30 January 2011

Co-production: Festival Faits d’hiver, Tanzhaus NRW, PLANT
Co-realisation: Mains d’Oeuvres.
Supported by Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication – DRAC Ile de France, Dicream, Adami. Created in residence at Mains d’Œuvres. Studios lent by CND and Micadanses.

Costume design and engineering: Amanda Parkes/ MIT Media Lab

Costume construction by Aaron Crosby.

Timepiece

Prue Lang — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 23:10:56 +0000

A dimension that enables two identical events occurring at the same point in space to be distinguished.

Created for the MichaelDouglas Kollektiv as part of their ‘One week stand’ series, Timepiece is a response to the collective’s request to create a work in a relatively short timeframe (7days). In order to achieve this Lang chose to create a model, which encompassed autonomy and order whilst focusing on the specificities of the INSTANTANEOUS. Dividing the stage in two parts: the time taken by a particular action determined the duration and content of a simultaneously performed choreographic counteraction. Although the two events were aurally and conceptually inseparable, the spectator could visually bounce between them and follow the ever-evolving engagements that were taking place.

Bühne der Kulturen Köln, GERMANY 2010

Tanzhaus Köln, GERMANY 2010

Production: MichaelDouglas Kollektiv

Supported by: Kunststiftung NRW, SK Stiftung Kultur, Kulturamt der Stadt Köln, Kunstsalon

Stiftung and the Ministerium des Landes NRW.

Rubicon

Prue Lang — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 23:00:17 +0000

Rubicon was a commission for the 2010 Adelaide International Arts Festival for the Australian company Leigh Warren & Dancers.

Wind moves horizontally, while a draft moves vertically.

If these were parameters for a game, what would be the inherent logic that could be experienced or played out? If the mind fluctuates between discovery and calculation in order to construct a pathway through a larger network, what are the consequences of invisibility? Proliferating from a specifically designed dance floor by Mary Moore, Rubicon is choreographic manifestation of a game system– one in which strategy, meandering, navigation, organisation and manipulation play inside a set of shifting coordinates.

Space Theatre – Adelaide Festival Centre, Adelaide, AUSTRALIA 2010

Co-production: Leigh Warren & Dancers, Adelaide Festival and the Adelaide Festival Centre’s Pivot(al) program

Infinite Temporal Series II

Prue Lang — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 23:00:02 +0000

In 2003 Prue Lang began a choreographic series inspired by the writings of Jorge Luis Borges. The series came from a desire to create a concise yet dense format of performance, in which the complexity of an idea is explored over many years. Consequently each work develops its own textual, perceptual and physical form subsequently embedded in the next. Lang’s interest in performance-making is the ephemeral state in which one’s ability to perceive, sense and project can produce an experience that transcends traditional notions of space and time. In Infinite Temporal Series II, the space is configured so that the performers, sound and projection of texts are spatially fractured, but take place simultaneously. The spectator is invited into an intimate and sensorial environment, from which to shape his/her own individual and multi-perspectival reading of the event. The result is a fluid and fascinating cycle of unfolding clues that correspond to the shifting perspectives on the underlying narrative.

30 min
10m x 10m
4 x performers

Künstlerhaus Mousonturm Frankfurt GERMANY 2007
Tanz performance köln, Cologne GERMANY 2007

Co-production : Tanz performance köln, Künstlerhaus Mousonturm Frankfurt, Cercle Rouge France Supported by: NATIONALE PERFORMANCE NETZ aus Mitteln des Tanzplans Deutschland der Kulturstiftung des Bundes. With residency support from Centre National de la Danse – Paris.

Apocalypse and poetic infinity

Prue Lang — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 23:00:04 +0000

Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger

The proscenium makes it inevitable: one looks at the other.
Seldom, however does such intimacy succeed in a proscenium-like construction as it does in Prue Lang’s exquisite “Infinite Temporal Series II”. The Cologne association “tanz performance köln” invited long-time Forsythe dancer-choreographer to its festival in the Alte Feuerwache, a mini-edition of the previous “DAMPF” festival.

Prue Lang wanted a moving audience: Actually, her spectators can walk, place themselves alternately in four black prosceniums which she has built around a central space with the dancers inside. But hardly anyone could have the concentration to solve this performance, in which one felt like a witness of a physical experiment, if it were not for this unbelievable sensuousness, Prue Lang succeeds despite abstraction.

By means of the escalating breath of the dancers, the warm light one senses, the quiet spatial electronic sound and the movements always gentle even in the quick passages – the performance proves an absolute security of aesthetic style, even by her restraint. In such a dramatic apocalypse, Prue Lang opposed poetic infinity –and that was certainly not a random choice (Nis)

Mord im Aquarium – Prue Lang’s innovative Dance installation in the Frankfurt Künstlerhaus Mousonturm

Prue Lang — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 23:00:30 +0000

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

As soon as the music rumbles in the loudspeakers, as if under water, one has the feeling of entering a completely different world and stays in this world until the end of the performance.

The spectators of Prue Lang’s innovative dance installation “Infinite Temporal Series II” in Frankfurt’s Mousonturm are not only viewer of the events, but also part of the staging – the staging of a special vision. On four sides separated from each other, they sit around a black box, looking through four large openings.

From far, each of the four rooms of viewers look like cinemas, at close range it recalls being in the middle of an aquarium in which three other sides are strung with twilight faces. One may also get up and move, the view is simultaneously the same, but not the sound. Through ones own motion, a feeling for the whole space is perceived, for the backs open up from real theatrical spaces to actual walls of the previous box. The small, warmly illuminated space has a magical effect largely due to the movement of his inhabitants.

In only a few square meters four beings float up and down, very slowly, briefly a head twitches aside or a body focal point drops. The eyes of the four dancers in blouses and trousers seem to see into another world. The Australian dancer and choreographer Prue Lang, who danced and choreographed for years with William Forsythe, created “Infinite Temporal Series I” for nine members of the Frankfurt Ballet in 2003 -an enchanting arrangement of small rooms with views throughout. In the Mousonturm now for the first time the successive piece is presented, more limited, however equally fascinating, also by its ambiguity.

Different movement speeds are scenically strung together, there is never a standstill, everything is in flux, and at the end the images and the states mix together. First, each entity is on its own, then they notice each other, seize themselves at the shoulders, finally stretch two fingers like a pistol and an opposite falls down in slow motion down and stands up again. How are these strange concretizations derived from the “dive” in the aquarium? Finally, they create stage, cinema and the poetic fantasy of other worlds, but also the crime. Or are the played murders to make the spectator attentive to their own gaze? Does a kind geologic history of aqueous birth up to the chaos perhaps even pass by? At the end the dancers and spectators disappear and the rounded chair backs look like waves. Perhaps again a new life will develop. (Melanie Suchy)

Did you ever want to be someone else?

Prue Lang — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 23:00:08 +0000

At the invitation of the TATE Modern Prue Lang and Mathieu Briand created a site-specific performance in the Turbine Hall for 100 members of the public. Participants responded to an advertisement in the newspaper inviting them to change their identity and be part of a real-time performance system.
Each participant is fitted with a latex mask and responds to specific instructions sent by SMS over the course of an hour. Through the dissemination of this real-time information, a physical network of operations and behaviours evolve and intersect the public space. Using the natural flow of visitors in the Turbine Hall this unique performance explores identity and social behaviour through its individual and collective dimensions.

60 minutes
Site-specific
100 x performers

Turbine Hall – TATE Modern, London U.K. 2007

Production : The Tate Modern UBS Openings: The Long Weekend 2007 U.K.

A divided moment of attention

Prue Lang — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 23:00:03 +0000

To help bring her own personal examination of new forms of dance and performance theatre to the stage, the 52 year-old actress Elettra de Salvo comissioned two international choreographers and a dance-dramaturge to create a solo for her. Prue Lang, Jochen Roller and Célestine Hennermann were all 33 years old when they created this performance trilogy – Some others and me. They observed the actress with respect to her manner, her career and her everyday life and came to similar conclusions, but with different implications. Aesthetically, each developed wholly individual pieces, for, with and by way of Elettra de Salvo. At the heart of the work is the conflict of two generations of artists, divided by almost 20 years and an accordingly altered sense of aesthetics.

20 / 20 / 20 minutes
7m x 9m
1 x performer

Künstlerhaus Mousonturm Frankfurt GERMANY 2006
Context Festival - Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin GERMANY 2007

Co-production : Künstlerhaus Mousonturm Frankfurt, Hebbel-am-Ufer Berlin.
Supported by : Fonds Darstellende Künste e.V., Amt für Wissenschaft und Kunst Stadt Frankfurt am Main, Hessisches Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Kunst, Istituto Italiano di Cultura Frankfurt am Main.

Temps d’Images à la Ferme du Buisson à Noisiel

Prue Lang — Sat, 07 Oct 2006 23:00:42 +0000

Paris Critiques

José Manuel Gonçalves est au moins un directeur de scène nationale qui ne se contente pas des vieilles formules d’abonnements, et d’une programmation de goût moyen uniforme. Dès que l’on pénètre dans l’enceinte de cette ancienne ferme des chocolats Poulain, on est saisi par l’atmosphère de culture vivante. On n’est pas dans le compassé, on n’est pas dans un funérarium, on est dans un lieu vivant. Cela se sent tout de suite.Temps d’image s’annonce comme un laboratoire des arts. Cela est initié par Arte et la ferme du Buisson, et cela a lieu dans huit pays d’Europe et même au Canada. Ce qui est curieux, c’est que ce n’est absolument pas l’ambiance frelatée de l’Avignon 2005. On a droit ici à des réelles recherches d’artistes qui même non abouties vous ouvrent l’appétit.
Je ne vois que 3 spectacles sur une vingtaine de propositions, puisque je ne peux être présent que cette fin d’après midi du 8 octobre:
La fleur de peau. Prue Lang, Mathieu Briand- On doit revêtir une combinaison blanche, être nu- pieds, et porter un masque. On est introduit dans une salle remplie de talc (4 tonnes). Sensation de douceur sous la plante des pieds. Les 40 personnes du public sont disposées sur les 3 côtés de la salle. Dès que l’on bouge, un léger nuage de talc s’élève au dessus du sol. Lumière violette rasante. Un couple, dont une danseuse de Forsythe, vont bouger très lentement au fond de l’arène. C’est amoureux, intime et très doux. On plane. L’imagination est à la fête. Cela ne dure qu’une demie heure. On ne voit pas tout, on devine les formes, la danseuse a la seins a l’air, mais en suis- je vraiment sûr, c’est sans importance.
L’aube d’un tortionnaire Théâtre clandestine -Une tentative de reproduire sur scène l’expérience de Stanley Milgram. (Montrer comment n’importe qui peut devenir tortionnaire à partir d’une expérience où l’on doit envoyer des décharges électriques de plus en plus forte à un individu). L’équipe est italienne. Un commentaire nous raconte qu’Eichmann était tout sauf un monstre, or il a commis des choses monstrueuses. Le spectacle commence très mollement avec de la musique techno et de la vidéo, au bout de 20 minutes, on voit enfin la fausse chambre de tortures. Malheureusement, cela n’avance toujours pas. Tentative avortée. Dommage.
Tout vu. Transquinquennal. Jan Hammenecker -Un spectacle sur la télévision, par une équipe de belges bien décapante. Le spectacle n’en est qu’à sa seconde représentation, donc il est encore trop foisonnant, mais la première demi-heure sous forme de conférence est un bonheur. Ensuite, cela traine en longueur, et à partir du moment où un jeu se fait avec 24 téléviseurs, cela devient ennuyeux comme de la télé. Mais potentiellement, il y a à attendre de cette équipe. (Jacques Livchine)

La Fleur de Peau

Prue Lang — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 23:00:14 +0000

Something overriding logic and moving between the senses

Lang chose to collaborate with French artist Mathieu Briand –renowned for his fine art in sensory perception- on this work for the Festival Temps d’Images in Paris. Inspired by Duchamp’s Infrathin they together developed a unique sensorial environment to enhance and intensify the spectator’s perception of Dance. The audience are given protective clothing suits and asked to experience the performance barefoot. On entering the performance space, feet plunge into five tonnes of talcum powder and a green laser floods and slices the space, creating an optical illusion of being immersed in water. As Kristin Swiat and Luis Rodriguez begin their duet, sound drifts through the space and the choreography becomes a crystallized skin generating waves of fine talc that float in and out of the light. The notion of Infrathin is one of focus and the spectator simultaneously resolves the dancing bodies with his/her own proprioceptive contact with the talc. The mesmerizing nexus of image, movement and sensation, brings an entirely new way of perceiving and situating oneself in contemporary dance.

30 minutes
10m x 7m
2 x performers

Festival Temps d’Images ARTE/ La ferme du buisson, Paris FRANCE 2005
Transart festival, Bolzano ITALY 2006
ARTE tracks – La fleur de peau et Prue Lang avec Mathieu Briand FRANCE 2006

Co-production : La ferme du Buisson –Scene nationale de Marne-la-Vallee / ARTE, Tanzhaus NRW Düsseldorf

Iris

Prue Lang — Wed, 30 Nov 2005 23:00:11 +0000

Iris finds its focal point in the subversion of the male gaze on the female body. The eponymous character derives satisfaction working as an undercover call girl to collect photographic evidence for a female client. Exploiting her own fetishistic gaze on the male body, Iris skilfully achieves her objectives through a subtle game of seductive manipulation. The film provides a conceptual framework in order to appropriate the female dancing body while exploring subversive gazes within a film narrative. The camera is used both as the protagonist’s device for capturing an image while simultaneously providing the audience with a lens to consider their own socially constructed views on gender. Dialogue is deliberately absent from the film to exemplify that the implicit lies delicately between the physical actions and the shifting examination of the gaze.

6 minutes
Short film
within Frankfurt Dance Cuts

ARTE Televison FRANCE / GERMANY 2005,
Dance on camera festival, New York U.S A. 2005
Dance screen Bristol U.K. 2005
Festival Temps d’image Rome ITALY 2005
Reeldance International Dance on Screen festival, Sydney AUSTRALIA 2006
Cinedans Festival, Amsterdam HOLLAND 2006
Festival di palazzo venezia, Rome ITALY 2006

Produktion: Tag/Traum Köln, Auftragsproduktion für ZDF/ARTE

The Kleine episode

Prue Lang — Sun, 31 Jul 2005 23:00:13 +0000

EPISODE is a collective formed by Prue Lang, Nicole Peisl, and Richard Siegal, dedicated to the development of extemporaneous performance. In an attempt to re-think the performance-making process, the collective created the Episode dogma through which to develop systems of real-time composition. Each Episode is created in accordance with the dogma and opens the space to collective participation and authorship.

At the invitation of Klapstuk #12 Festival, Episode collaborated with Berlin laptop musician Christian Kleine to create and perform The Kleine episode. Fourty-four different smurfs were placed on the stage and acted as an interface between the dancers and the musician. Together they developed a real-time performance system in which the displacement of smurfs and their particular qualities triggered changes in light, sound and physicality, enabling them to simutaneously create and manipulate the theatrical dynamics of the space.

40 minutes
10m x 8m
4 x performers

Klapstuk #12 festival, Leuven BELGIUM 2005

Co-production : STUK Leuven, Belgium and the EPISODE collective

Fiftyfourville

Prue Lang — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 23:00:26 +0000

Sometimes reality is too complex for oral communication, but legend embodies it in a form that enables it to spread all over the world. Jean-Luc Godard, Alphaville.

In collaboration with video artist Cindy Lee and performers Vanessa Le Mat, Roberta Mosca, Krisha Swiat and Mario Zambrano, Fiftyfourville is a choreographic work that questions the processes of living and connecting that inhabit the way we construct and view the world around us. Following on from Infinite Temporal Series, which was inspired by the labyrinth as a literary motif to explore narrative structures, Fiftyfourville relates the concept of the labyrinth to that of the Deleuzian rhizome. The labyrinth is defined both by the path that leads one into the centre and the path that leads one astray. In contrast to centred systems with hierarchical modes of communication and pre-established paths, the rhizome is an acentred, non-hierarchical system, devoid of formal organisation and defined solely by a circulation of states. Reflecting on the film Alphaville –Godard’s dystopian universe in which a central automaton dictates all individual orientation, Lang uses these three spatio-temporal models to investigate the production of physical language, choreographic structure and modes of perception.

56 min
10m x 10m
4 x performers

Hebbel-am-ufer (HAU 3) Berlin, GERMANY 2004
Tanzhaus NRW Düsseldorf GERMANY 2005
Künstlerhaus Mousonturm Frankfurt GERMANY 2004
Rencontres choregraphiques internationales de Seine-Saint-Denis Paris FRANCE 2005
Kalamata International Dance Festival, GREECE 2005

Co-production: Hebbel am Ufer Berlin, tanzhaus nrw Düsseldorf, Künstlerhaus Mousonturm Frankfurt, Rencontres Chorégraphiques Internationales de Seine-Saint-Denis Paris

Supported by: STUK kunstencentrum Leuven, Fonds Darstellende Künste e.V aus den Mitteln der Beauftragten des Bundes für Kultur und Medien

Borges narrative inspires a moving dream

Prue Lang — Mon, 11 Apr 2005 23:00:02 +0000

The Australian

Australian choreographer Prue Lang has spent nearly 10 years in Europe, the past five collaborating and performing with William Forsythe, who revolutionized ballet technique in the most shocking, contemporary ways.
Infinite Temporal series looks nothing like any Forsythe work seen in Australia during the past few years but is informed by his creative methods. It is made with a perfectionist’s microscopic gaze, evaluating and editing the dancer’s responses to specific investigative tasks, and shaped to insinuate itself into the viewer’s mind.
The rewards in this transfixing 25-minute work, with images of bodies in a field of seemingly limitless space, are glorious, enduringly so.
The Garden of Forking Paths – a novel by Jorge Luis Borges, is the inspiration for Infinite: Lang reflects on Borges’ notions of simultaneous temporalities, and explores dreams intersecting with consciousness and narrative form in dance. She invited the viewer to construct a personal narrative by observing several dances simultaneously.
Crucial to Lang’s concept is her design, an arcade of five rooms, each with a large, unglazed window, through which viewers – 30 at a time, in three shows a night – are free to move, just as the dancers do. Sitting in the last room, one can see the entire vista, as if through a series of proscenia or a hall of mirrors. The effect is of seeing multiple images filled with potential scenarios.
When all nine dancers move, each with different gestures but all at once, Tiepolo’s ceilings come to mind. In stasis, the dancer could be Caravaggio or Vermeer portraits: quiet but loaded, seen against the furthermost wall on which ripe, persimmon-coloured light is projected, then smudged or blackened with charcoal. Holding all of this together are fragments of Borges’ text and perfectly sympathetic sonics by Deadbeat,and Ekkehard Ehlers.
Infinite is an entirely contemporary creation yet suggests older associations such as Tai Chi, in which different body parts rotate around different axes, cohering into one fluid expression. At other times the movement is lyrical, searching, but never soft; or driven, springy and even jerky, as if pulled around by elastic twanging inside the dancers’ bodies.
Clearly, this synthesis of Lang’s ideas is not just about movement; it demands much more than the dancers’ kinaesthetic intelligence and investment in the smallest detail. Lang has drawn from them all of the depths of emotion and sensitivity that are dramatically transformative.
Infinite Temporal Series is a gift to every dancer in it: Kristy Ayre, Fiona Cameron, Antony Hamilton, Paea Leach, Jo Lloyd, Ryan Lowe, Carlee Mellow, Byron Perry and Claire Peters. (Lee Christofis)

Interactive gem, from any angle

Prue Lang — Fri, 08 Apr 2005 19:27:38 +0000

The Age

In Infinite Temporal Series expatriate Australian Prue Lang immerses the audience in an infinitely intriguing experience. It is deliberately intimate, with the tiny audience situated in close proximity to the dancers in a series of rooms, each with a bench along one wall. Each room has a frame in the back wall, allowing the audience to see through to the next, or look back towards the first. Audience members are encouraged to move from one room to the next, though it can be equally satisfying to remain in one place throughout the 35-minute presentation.
At first, it feels like one of those lessons in the art of perspective, with the performers diminishing in size, becoming more remote the further they are distanced from the viewer. A dancer stands motionless in each room. All begin slowly and simultaneously with a slow twist, drawing a languorous hand up the front of the body to reach upwards, then stepping out into a sweeping spiral. One is caught between watching the close-up detail of the proximal dancer, or enjoying the synergy of the ensemble.
The dancers maintain a distanced focus, but we can see the tremble of muscles, the flicker of eyelashes, and hear the harsh breathing as they are pulled or projected violently by some apparently external force. Over this, one dancer addresses his audience in a gentle treatise on being and not being. The words appear to have no direct relationship to the action, but somehow influence our thinking.
Gradually the dancers introduce different movements so that we see contrasts in energy or direction from a single dancer, set against the synchronicity of the group. The intricacy increases, but we have been led into it slowly, learning to enjoy the multiplicity of choices. The serendipitous intrusions of audience members as they move from one room to another, taking up positions to look forward or backwards to see through to the front room become framed like portraits. We see our neighbours in a new light – unwittingly becoming performers in a completely unthreatening way.
This is a profoundly satisfying work, carefully polished – not to be missed. (Hilary Crampton)

Infinite Temporal Series

Prue Lang — Tue, 30 Nov 2004 23:00:18 +0000

Infinite Temporal Series is a choreographic installation created by Prue Lang. Inspired by the writing of Jorge Luis Borges, the work explores performance via experimental narrative structures of simultaneous temporalities. The set is a self-contained performance space consisting of a row of five adjacent rooms with two corridors along each side. Each room contains a bench for audience seating. While each spectator is situated in an intimate relationship to the performers in their particular room, they are also afforded a view beyond that room’s immediate confines that penetrates the multiple layers of space and movement in subsequent rooms. Spectators can move freely from room to room during the performance to construct their own individual and multi-perspectival experience of the work. Within this intimate environment, discontinuities of perception emerge as the pursuit of form becomes a technical inquiry of time. The tension between the perspectival framing of the space and the circular choreographic structure produces a meditative experience of temporal simultaneity and duration within a relatively short performance time. Rebecca Groves

30 min
20m x 6m
9 x performers

Bockenheimer Depot /TAT, Frankfurt GERMANY 2003
Klapstuk Festival #11 Leuven BELGIUM 2003
Tanzplattform Deutschland, Düsseldorf GERMANY 2004
Pelerinages Festival Weimar GERMANY 2004
Festival Mettre-en-Scene, Rennes FRANCE 2004
Les Halles de Schaerbeek Brussels BELGIUM 2005
Chunky Move performance space, Melbourne AUSTRALIA 2005

Co-production : Ballett Frankfurt -Das TAT/ Bockenheimer depot, Kunstfest Weimar

The How episode

Prue Lang — Sat, 31 Jul 2004 23:00:13 +0000

In collaboration with performers – Ayman Harper, Charlie Hubner, David Kern, Vanessa Le Mat and Roberta Mosca -The How Episode was created after an invitation from Berlin’s CONTEXT festival whose theme in 2004 was « authorship ». Episode began the process by asking each performer to buy a fortune cookie on a specific day and noted the recollections of this event. The network of individual trajectories and experiences very quickly brought up issues of orientation, expectation, interpretation and translation, from which physical and linguistic parameters were developed for the performance system. Members of the audience were invited to set the dance in motion by responding to questions that subsequently fed into the real-time system. The translation from one language to another, from text into movement, and from movement into language, generated a stream of transforming compositions, facilitating the articulation of a collective performance system.

50 minutes
10m x 8m
8 x performers

Hebbel-am-ufer (HAU 3) Berlin GERMANY 2004

Co-production : Hebbel-am-Ufer Berlin and the EPISODE collective

Uncharted

Prue Lang — Wed, 30 Jun 2004 23:00:27 +0000

Uncharted is a short film in which a couple (Crystal Pite and Richard Siegal) contend with the discrepancies between physical and mental space in a cryptic dual occupancy. Ideals and insecurities spin a web in which they search for a thread to self-understanding, while the unknown hovers around them. Exploring the issue of instability, the film reflects the tensions between isolation and co-dependency, gradually revealing the characters’ idiosyncratic activities. The enigmatic and experimental montage by media artist Cindy Lee lures the viewer into a world where echoes of dream, memory and reality overlap, dance and constrict. The movement of the camera is in frequent counterpoint to the action itself, as the ambivalent narrative process of losing and finding is brought into light.

5 minutes
Short film

Bockenheimer Depot/TAT, Frankfurt GERMANY 2004

Co-production : Ballett Frankfurt -Das TAT/ Bockenheimer depot Frankfurt

ScreenPlay

Prue Lang — Sun, 30 Nov 2003 23:00:08 +0000

A collaboration between Prue Lang, writer David Le Barzic and media artist Cindy Lee, this work is an experiment in choregraphed reading. ScreenPlay posits the implicit (the unsaid, the unseen and the unheard) as a central element of communication, exercising shifting effects on the audience’s experience of a work. ScreenPlay consists of a video projection cascading down three screening levels. The installation can be watched from above and/or at eye level, inviting the audience to circumnavigate and experience it through various vantage points. The interplay of text, image and sound induces the audience to privilege a certain perspective, until another takes over, questioning in particular its strong reliance on dimensions as intangible, elusive and illusive as space and time. As the images and text slide and shift around the structure the spectator engages physically in the reading of the event and the possibility of alternative narratives is revealed.

8 minutes (looped)
4m x 4m

Bockenheimer Depot/ Das TAT, Frankfurt GERMANY 2003
Pelerinages Festival, Weimar GERMANY 2004

Co-production : Ballett Frankfurt -Das TAT/ Bockenheimer Depot Frankfurt

The Blueprint episode

Prue Lang — Mon, 30 Jun 2003 23:00:54 +0000

Episode was born from a meeting in the Frankfurt Ballett between Prue Lang, Nicole Peisl and Richard Siegal who shared a common desire to rethink their performance-making process. The name Episode refers to two important aspects of their artistic agenda: collectivity and serial process. They believe the idea of collectivity is important to investigate in contemporary performance-making in which authorship is an embedded subject. Making dance in the 21st century is characterized by collaboration, idiosyncrasy, and developing methods that allow for the individual to determine the performance. To challenge their own process they create a dogma through which to develop each performance and open the space to collective participation and authorship.

The Blueprint episode was the first site-specific commission for the collective. Using a 20 metre space in the Frankfurt Neue Börse, the collective defined an imaginary architecture to which they applied rules of chance to a series of numbered spaces. The activation and function of particular spaces changed according to the previous interaction, enabling a real-time choreographic system by which the performers could produce an unforeseeable structure.

30 minutes
20m x 4m
8 x performers

Neue Börse, Frankfurt a.m. GERMANY 2003

Co-production : Frankfurter Kultur Komitee / Eurex Neue Börse Frankfurt and the EPISODE collective

Spiel mit fünf Räumen – Tanzinstallation von Prue Lang

Prue Lang — Thu, 13 Mar 2003 23:00:24 +0000

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

Durch einen Vorhang erhält man Zutritt zu einem der fünf hintereinander liegenden Räume, die Prue Lang, Tänzerin des Frankfurte Balletts- für ihre Tanzinstallation “lnfinite Temporal Series” im Bockenheimer Depot hat bauen lassen. Durch Fenster, die auf den ersten Blick aussehen wie Spiegel und die sich perspektivisch in der Ferne verkleinern, sind sie miteinander verbunden. In jedem Raum gibt es eine Bank, auf der die Zuschauer Platz nehmen können.

Dann betritt je ein Tänzer oder eine Tänzerin einen Raum. Synchron beginnen sie zunächst, sich ganz langsam zu strecken und zu drehen, bis der erste ausbricht, um seiner eigenen Zeit zu folgen. Plötzlich tauchen immer mehr Tänzer und Tänzerinnen auf, von denen jeder seinen eigenen Zeit vorgaben zu folgen scheint. Scharf umrissen erscheinen ihre Gesichter und Oberkörper in den Fenster rahmen, als wären sie zweidimensionale Fotografien, die man hintereinander geschichtet hat. Jeder Raum wird unterschiedlich bespielt. Mal ballt sich das Geschehen ganz vorne m ersten, mal konzentriert es sich ün mittleren. Bei aller Nähe zu den Tänzern gleitet der Blick doch in die Ferne, sucht nach Mustern in der Choreographie.

Amancio Gonzales als Sprecher lebt in einem ganz anderen Raum als seine Kollegen. Als einziger darf er durch die Fenster klettern, als gälten die Grenzen für ihn nicht. Geschickt zieht Lang das Tempo an und wechselt die musikalischen Grundstimmungen. Die Zuschauer haben theoretisch die Möglichkeit, die Räume während der Vorstellung zu wechseln, um sich andere Perspektiven zu eröffnen. Nach nur knapp einer halben Stunde ist der Tanz schon wieder vorbei. Doch diesmal hätte man sich gewünscht, er dauerte länger. Denn Langs Installation birgt, gerade was Körperbilder und choreographische Möglichkeiten betrifft, noch ein weitaus größeres Potential in sich, das man in der Zukunft unbedingt ausschöpfen sollte. (Gerald Siegmund)

Ästhetischer Abgesang Choreografische Installation von Prue Lang in Frankfurt

Prue Lang — Mon, 10 Mar 2003 23:00:48 +0000

Gießener Anzeiger

FRANKFURT. Es ist die labyrinthartige Erzählstruktur in den Texten von Jorge Luis Borges, die die Frankfurter Tänzerin und Choreografin Prue Lang fasziniert. Jene Verwobenheit, Komplexität, Unendlichkeit ins Theater zu übertragen, ist ihr selbst gestecktes Ziel. “Infinite Temporal Series” heißt die choreografische Installation, mit der sie jetzt diesen Versuch wagt. Die Premiere des knapp 30-minütigen Stücks war am Wochenende im Bockenheimer Depot.

Lang gehört sei 1999 zum Ensemble des Balletts Frankfurt, wo sie dem Publikum aus Stücken wie “Endless House” oder “Woolf Phrase” bekannt ist. Die neue Installation hat es in sich: Prue Lang hat für ihr Projekt fünf quadratische Räume in einer Reihe hintereinander entworfen. In jedem Raum gibt es eine Bank für die Zuschauer, deren Anzahl auf insgesamt 30 begrenzt ist. Große Fenster in den Wänden zwischen den fünf Räumen eröffnen dem Publikum einen Durchblick auf den jeweils nächsten Raum, der so wie eine Spiegelung des eigenen wirkt. In diesen Räumen bewegen sich neun Tänzer, die während der Vorstellung die Räume wechseln und sich durch die Installation bewegen. Aber auch das Publikum darf -nein, sollte – während der Aufführung den Raum wechseln, sich in den einen oder anderen setzen; je nach eigenem Gutdünken. Dabei gibt es keine Musik, lediglich Klänge und Rhythmen sowie sprachliche Elemente, zu denen sich die Tänzer bewegen.

Interessant ist die Performance in erster Linie im Hinblick auf der Frage nach der Existenz eines Werkes. Langs Arbeit ist eine der eindrucksvollsten Belege für die Negation des Werkbegriffs: Dadurch, dass jeder Zuschauer individuell Position und Blickwinkel. wechselt, entsteht das Werk erst mit der Wahrnehmung durch seinen Betrachter. Jeder im Raum nimmt die Aktionen naturgemäß unterschiedlich auf, schreibt für sich die Choreografie der Ereignisse selbst. Die Interaktion mit den Tänzern und den übrigen Zuschauern gerät dabei zum wesentlichen Gestaltungsmittel dieses ästhetischen Abgesangs. Je nachdem, an welcher Position innerhalb der fünf Räume sich der Zuschauer gerade befindet, erscheint ihm die Situation komplett anders, nimmt er Worte wahr, die andere nicht verstehen, liest er projizierte Sätze, die andere nicht sehen. “infinite Tempo Series” ist damit weit mehr als ein Projekt oder ein Versuch. Es ist ein choreografierter Beitrag zur kunstästhetischen Rezeption, der selbst die letzten Zweifler fallen lässt. (Christian Rupp)

Erleuchtung im Spiegelbild

Prue Lang — Sun, 09 Mar 2003 23:00:12 +0000

Frankfurter Neue Presse

In Prue Langs wunderbarer Einrichtung führt jemand die Zuschauer zu einer langgestreckten Raum- oder Zellenflucht: weiche Außen-, starre Trennwände in Schwarz. Die fünf drei auf vier Meter kleinen Zellen kommunizieren durch fenstergleiche Öffnungen; jede enthält eine Sitzbank und eine offene (Tanz-) Fläche. Man ist aufgefordert, nach Belieben den Aufenthaltsort zu wechseln, ohne die Performance zu stören. Auch Tänzer und Tänzerinnen fließen in wechselnder Konstellation von einer Raum-Monade in die andere, wobei sie – einen Schritt vom Betrachter -ihre poetisch weich verdrehten Zeitlupen- und schroffen Bewegungsfolgen vollführen. Sie ,spielen’ einzig sich selbst in ihrer schönen Leiblichkeit. Nur ein Akteur rezitiert vorwiegend BorgesTexte und mutiert gleichsam zur Spielfigur. Die in Reihe geschalteten Guckkästen aber, mit Guckloch an der Stirnfront des vordersten und roter Bildfläche aus verfremdeten Fotos am hintersten Raum, nehmen als asketische Tanzstätten beide auf: die Tänzer, die sich anfangs wie Spiegelbilder gerieren, um aus dem kleinsten ,Fehler’ zwischen Bild und Abbild alles Weitere zu entwickeln; und ihre Betrachter, die in Intimität selbst zu Betrachteten werden. Eine weitere “Specials”-Erleuchtung! (Marcus Hladek)

Den Luftzug der Bewegung spürbar machen Prue Lang über ihre Tanzinstallation im Bockenheimer Depot

Prue Lang — Sun, 23 Feb 2003 23:00:27 +0000

F.A.Z.

Der Blick auf benachbarte Kunstsparten ist für viele zeitgenössische Künstler selbstverständlich. Freimütig verwenden Choreographen literarische Texte in ihren Stücken, entwickeln bildende Künstler Installationen, in denen der Ton und das Hören eine wichtige Rolle spielen, arbeiten Theaterregisseure mit Videoeinspielungen, die ihren Inszenierungen einen zweiten imaginären Raum eröffnen. Jenseits vordergründiger Schaueffekte, die es oft genug zu beklagen gibt, bietet der Umweg über das benachbarte Feld auch die Chance, das Eigene mit einem fremden Blick zu betrachten. Prue Lang gehört seit 1999 zum Ensemble des Balletts Frankfurt, wo sie dem Publikum aus Stücken wie “Endless House” oder “Woolf Phrase” bekannt ist.

In Melbourne am Australien College of the Arts, wo sie studiert hat, hatte sie viele Stücke für die Bühne entwickeln müssen. Doch das allein habe sie nie zufriedengestellt. So hat sie neben ihrer Ausbildung zur Tänzerin immer wieder Ausflüge in die Welt des Films gemacht, um von dort aus auf den Tanz zu schauen. “Ich war schon immer fasziniert von der Beziehung zwischen Tänzern und Publikum. Wie kann ich diese Beziehung inszenieren, Blicke lenken und bewußtmachen? In einer traditionellen Aufführungssituation, in der man das Stück nur von vorne sieht, geht das normalerweise unter. Man spürt im Zuschauersaal den Luftzug Bewegung nicht.”

Fasziniert von Jorge Luis Borges’ Erzählungen, in denen sich verschiedene Geschichten ineinanderschachteln, hat sie sich überlegt, wie sie die labyrinthartige Struktur seiner Geschichten ins Theater übersetzen könnte. Das Resultat ist ihre Tanz,installation “infinite Temporal Series”, die das Ballett Frankfurt im März im Bockenheimer Depot präsentiert. Wer sich durchs Labyrinth bewegt, muß viele Umwege in Kauf nehmen, um ans Ziel zu kommen. Als Bewegung innerhalb einer festen Form gilt das Labyrinth, von dem schon Homer in der “llias” berichtet, es sei der erste Tanzplatz im Palast von Knossos gewesen, als Sinnbild für den Tanz schlechthin.

Vor diesem Hintergrund hat Prue Lang fünf Räume in einer Reihe entworfen. In jedem Raum gibt es eine Bank für die Zuschauer, deren Anzahl pro Durchgang auf 30 begrenzt ist. Kleine, sich perspektivisch verjüngende Fenster eröffnen dem Publikum einen Durchblick auf den nächsten Raum, der so wie eine Spiegelung des eigenen Raums wirkt. Neun Tänzer, die während der Vorstellung die Räume wechseln können, bewegen sich durch die Installation, an deren Ende ein Diaprojektor Bilder der Tänzer an die Wand wirft. Daß auch das Publikum umhergehen kann, um sich seinen Blickwinkel frei zu wählen, ist Prue Lang wichtig. “Jeder Zuschauer soll sich sein eigenes Zeitfenster bauen, durch das er auf die Performance blickt”, erzählt sie. Jeder der Tänzer habe seine eigene Zeitstruktur, die aus einer anfänglichen Improvisation heraus entwickelt wurde. An bestimmten Punkten gehe dann jeder einen anderen Weg durch das Labyrinth.

Ausgangspunkt für die Bewegungsfindung seien Träume der Tänzer gewesen, die sie aufgeriffen hätten. “Im Traum herrscht eine andere Zeit. Dinge erscheinen in einer anderen Chronologie, überlagern oder verschieben sich. Dem wollten wir in den Bewegungen ein Stück weit nachgehen.” Auch die unmittelbare Nähe zu den Tänzern kann die Zeitwahrnehmung der Zuschauer verändern. Erlebt man so manche Sequenzen intensiver als andere. Doch das Näher-dran-Sein im Labyrinth der sich gegenseitig beobachtenden Blicke birgt sowohl für das Publikum wie für die Tänzer Gefahren. Jeder muß seinen Schutzraum und seine Anonymität ein Stück weit verlassen, damit es zu einer Begegnung kommen kann. Daß das nicht jedem liegt, dessen ist sich Prue Lang bewußt. “Deshalb haben wir uns entschieden, daß es keinen direkten Kontakt zwischen den Tänzern und dem Publikum geben soll.”

Nach ihrer Ausbildung in Melbourne tanzte sie zunächst bei Meryl Tankards Australien Dance Theatre, bevor sie Mitte der neunziger Jahre nach Frankreich kam, um dort in renommierten Kompanien wie der Compagnie Cré-Ange und L’Esquisse zu tanzen. Doch bald schon hatte sie genug von den klischierten Rollenbildern, die im französischen Tanz nach wie vor hoch im Kurs stehen. Wie viele Geschichten, in denen sich Frauen an den Hals von Männern werfen, könne man als Frau im 21. Jahrhundert noch ertragen? Die Arbeit mit William Forsythe sei für sie nicht nur eine tänzerische, sondern auch eine intellektuelle Herausforderung. Forsythe habe ihr für ihre eigenen Arbeiten die Freiheiten gegeben, die sie brauchte. “Mach das, was du selbst gerne sehen möchtest”, sei sein Rat gewesen. Für die Abende mit Arbeiten von Ensemblemitgliedern hat sie in den vergangenen Jahren im Bockenheimer Depot schon zwei Installationen realisiert, die letzte zu Texten von Simone de Beauvoir.

Ende des Monats zeigt sie dort eine weitere ihrer Arbeiten. Die Videoinstallation “Screenplay” ist eine Zusammenarbeit mit dem Schriftsteller David le Barzic und der Medienkünstlerin Cindy Lee, in der es um die Übergänge zwischen den einzelnen Phasen des künstlerischen Schaffensprozesses gehen soll. Die Videoinstallation steht im Rahmen eines dreiteiligen Tanzabends, an dem Choreographien von Jone San Martin und Fabrice Mazliah (“Remote Versions”), Nathalie Thomas (“iii”) und Ayman Harper (Bye-bye Mingusblue”) zu sehen sein werden. In den Pausen und nach der Vorstellung wird zugleich eine Filminstaliation von Arnoud Noordegraaf gezeigt. Vorstellungen von “lnfinite Temporal Series” finden am 8. und 9. März um 19.30 und 20.00 sowie um 21.00 und 21.30 Uhr statt: Der choreographische Abend ist am 27. und 28. März um 20.00 und um 21.00 Uhr im Bockenheime Depot zu sehen. (Gerald Siegmund)

Intervenus

Prue Lang — Sun, 30 Jun 2002 23:00:43 +0000

Inspired by the writings of Simone de Beauvoir, Intervenus is a unique performance installation created with five women for the Frankfurt Ballet. Exploring the complexities of the self, the (female) body and the relation to the ‘other’, each performer correlates with a specific text and is linked by a large transforming projection. Rooted in the existentialism movement, which stresses personal experience and responsibility of the individual, Beauvoir’s singular and intimate accounts chosen for the work, describe the desire to make rational decisions despite existing in an irrational way. The performance format allows the audience member to choose to observe the performance from a distance, or sit directly opposite a performer simultaneously hearing her text through a pair of headphones. As one connects into the narrative space of the performer, a powerful shift takes place from being the observer to being the observed.

30 min
6m x 4m
5 x performers

Bockenheimer Depot/ Das TAT, Frankfurt GERMANY 2002

Co-production : Ballett Frankfurt -Das TAT/ Bockenheimer Depot Frankfurt

Narc

Prue Lang — Sat, 30 Jun 2001 23:00:33 +0000

“The image man has of himself is his limit.” Saint Exupery

Created for the Frankfurt Ballett, this duet examines the process inherent in one’s relationship to oneself through the reflection of what is visible. Often used as a self-development tool in dance, the continuous use of a mirror puts us into the Narcissus role of subliminal awareness and numbness in relation to the images of ourselves. The distinction between analysing the visual stimuli reflected back at oneself and analysing one’s physical expression through an inherent sensory awareness, creates a reference from which the dancer crafts his/her own art form. In this performance, a video projected onto and beyond the performers, creates a space in which the relationship to the self and the other, is in constant tension with the shifting reflection. The fluidly constructed visual layers and hypnotic physicality resonate in a powerful state of performance.

30 min
4m x 4m
2 x performers

Bockenheimer Depot/ Das TAT, Frankfurt GERMANY 2001

Co-production : Ballett Frankfurt -Das TAT/ Bockenheimer Depot Frankfurt