Show

The Field

Show-Off

Show-Off, the platform for short pieces, offers dance professionals from Zurich four weeks of shared rehearsal time, exchange and a professional setting. Up-and-coming artists supported by local mentors will develop short pieces of about 20 minutes each and then present their work to the public.

Melanie Alexander, Daouda Keita
Getanztes Glück (Danced Happiness)

"First dance, then think" – This is one of the 34 invitations you find in the Book "Das Glück der kleinen Gesten" (The Joy of small Gestures). Yes, dancing makes us happy. We have scientific proof and most of us have experienced it first-hand – or foot. A fact that two artists from two different countries have used to create bridges: from a fishing-village in Mali all the way to Zurich.
In his homeland, choreographer and dancer Daouda Keita offers training and education to hearing impaired people, giving them the possibility to express themselves creatively and integrate in society through his company Parole de Corps. "If you can’t communicate because of a handicap, you disappear, you go unnoticed, as well as your potential," Daouda explains. Melanie Alexander made herself a promise after a dramatic encounter with a blind and almost deaf man: to take responsibility. A smile here, a helping hand there. "The real handicap in society is the loss of humanity." Together with her co-author Chantal Sandjon she published Das Glück der kleinen Gesten (Edel Books, Hamburg, March 2019) – a book that combines scientific studies and praxis on the research of happiness.
It was a little gesture that marked the beginning of the collaboration between Melanie and Daouda. She spontaneously invited him to a workshop, he naturally engaged in a dialogue, and over an after-work beer he asked the simple question: "Have you ever thought about dancing your book?" Melanie was thrilled by the idea and accepted the invitation. Getanztes Glück combines the written word, body language and spoken word to form a piece of dance. To demonstrate how the happiness level of your fellow human beings as well as your own can rise with the simple act of little gestures.

Simon Fleury, Fabian Gutscher, Rosie Terry Toogood
Topia // A Predicament

Do you smell the air is different? Saturation in your flesh.
The exponential function is never found to grow indefinitely in nature. It always ends up with a collapse and results in self-regulation, a new cycle, a revolution. There are no solutions, there is no scientific progress, no economic growth, no transhumanism, no exponential layering that is going to sustain our social and eco-systems as we know them. But we keep on saturating, and we are all running exponentially toward a crash. It’s going to be difficult, unpleasant, destroying, violent – an impossible situation to escape from.
Wake up from our global anesthesia. Bring palliative care into every single posture and movement, into our attention, into our intention. Palliative care as a way to relate to everyone and everything, to listen, to be together, to merge.
We gather bodies in a resisting movement, allowing solidarity and interdependency to emerge. A dual state of vulnerability and strengthening. These gatherings are temporary work sites for inventing new utopia, attached locally in space, micro-bubbles becoming topia. Claiming universal palliative care will be our acknowledgment of our interdependency and a form of supporting the merger of all political and social activisms and struggling bodies and communities.
In our temporary topia, we allow the gathering of individuals that focus on care, empathy and comfort in their work and personal life. A deformation of the time-space continuum, hoping that our presence and actions will still resonate and gravitate in the future. A field distortion, a local gravity variation, a pulse.

Juliette Uzor, Elie Autin
OZONE

OZONE
tells of the dimensions of the body, of surfaces and what lies hidden beneath them, of the depths and heights of imaginary landscapes, of proximity and distance, of transitions. We are interested in the surface because it separates two things from each other, while it is also what connects everything that lies below it to everything that is above it. Each body is different and differently shaped – but more culturally and socially than biologically. The closer we get to individual body and movement languages, the more skin colour and gender issues become obsolete.

The Field
Post-Show Talk
The largest information resource we have, the internet, which has radically altered our modes of communication, has zero obligation to be factual. Anyone can say anything and present it as truthful, correct and unquestionable.
This world wide web where anything goes has marked the advent of a post-truth world where the boundary between fact and fiction becomes more difficult to discern and the distinction between truth-telling and lies less clear. This new reality has permeated our lives, infiltrating the apparent with ambiguity and staining the effable with ambivalence.
Zurich's new dance collective, The Field, shares Post-Show Talk – a space to uncover the inanity of parallel truths.
The Field is supported by BNP Paribas Swiss Foundation, Migros Culture Percentage and Landis & Gyr Foundation.

  • Bühne 1
    Tanzhaus Zürich
    Wasserwerkstrasse 127a
    8037 Zürich
  • Wheelchair accessible

  • Wheelchair accessible

  • KOPRODUKTION

  • CHF 15

Coaching Lea Moro and Marc Streit
Lighting design Anutoshen Hüer and David Baumgartner
Coproduction Tanzhaus Zürich

The Field

The Field is a collective of dance artists who have been working together since 2019. The collective has collaborated with local and international artists to create a range of works from large scale performances to intimate artistic exchanges. So far, The Field has developed works with Meg Stuart (Waterworks), Isabel Lewis (Scalable Skeletal Escalator), Simone Aughterlony (The Best and the Worst of Us) and is currently developing a piece with Ofelia Jarl Ortega.

The collective came into being from the necessity to create flexible, versatile, sensitive and enduring forms of togetherness, to find ways of articulating our cultural, social and political concerns through dance experiences. Their commitment to non-hierarchical forms of working shapes all of The Field’s artistic outputs.