MAPPLETHORPE
Dance
Dance und Choreography: Ismael Ivo
Music: Steve Reich, Giacomo Puccini
THU 12th of June., 20.00 h
FRI 13. of June + SAT 14. of June, 21.00 h
Admission: 14 Euro, reduced 10 Euro
WED 11. of June, 18.30 h > Talkshow with Ismael Ivo
(free admission)
THU 12. of June > Postshow Talk (free admission)
> The Production
The opening scene: Ismael Ivo with his back to the audience. Caught
behind a glass wall in a vertical tunnel, he stretches up, huddles
again. All to the pulsating music of Steve Reich ...
Ismael Ivo's latest solo reflects his encounter with Robert Mapplethorpe
and is at the same time a homage to the life work of the famous
photographer.
The performance consists of three parts:
'Prison' - the emancipation of the body, in the physical and spiritual
senses.
'Flowers' - a hundred and fifty white calla lillies, the flowers
that are presented so forcefully in Mapplethorpe's photographic
work;
'Mortality' - last solo on a small stela before a vast mirror.
Mapplethorpe divulged the look of desire at the black male body
- Ismael Ivo continues this appraisal in his performance.
> The Dancer
Ismael Ivo studied acting and dance in his native São Paulo,
where he was honoured as best dancer in 1981 and 1982. In 1983 he
joined the renowned "Alvin Ailey Dance Theatre" in New
York, later becoming a soloist. From 1996 to 2000 he directed the
Dance Theater at the Deutscher Nationaltheater Weimar. Ivo's work
plays with clichés of the black body in the western world,
exaggerating them and giving them an ironic twist. He has worked
with such performing arts figures as Johann Kresnik, George Tabori
and Takashi Kako. At the House of World Cultures he has appeared
in the commissioned productions "Tristan and Isolde" with
Marcia Haydée and "Die Zofen" (The Maids) by Yoshi
Oïda. Today Ismael Ivo lives and works in Berlin.
> The Photographer
In the 60s and 70s Robert Mapplethorpe's nude photographs scandalized
the American public. His trademark stylization and aestheticization,
especially of black bodies, made him an icon of contemporary photography.
He died in 1989. (Photos at www.mapplethorpe.org).
> The Opinion
"With an aesthetic sublety, the dancer - discovered while very
young by Alvin Ailey, champion of black America - has now staged
for the photographer a ceremony of the senses of extreme (calligraphic)
purity, freezing the onslaught of a burning theme"
Il Giorno / La Nazione
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- Undesirable Elements Berlin >>
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