Tumult

TUMULT deals with what happens when bodies engage in an interdependant act of negotiating and balancing weight, strength and the ongoing construction in the performance space. As the audience you’re on stage – seated inside to the scenography so close to the dancers, that you feel their movements and a room in turmoil vibrate in your own body.

Tina Tarpgaard is one of the most consistent and radical choreographers in the Danish dance environment. She insists that dancing is a kinesthetic experience – that is our sensory experience of movement. Even if the starting point for her performances often are very specific. For TUMULT it was Tina Tarpgaards experience of demonstrations during the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, which she witnessed. The texts by Judith Butler around the same events, became a great inspiration for the thought and creation process behind TUMULT:

No one body establishes the space of appearance, but this action, this performative exercise happens only “between” bodies, in a space that constitutes the gap between my own body and another’s. In this way, my body does not act alone, when it acts politically. Indeed, the action emerged from the “between.”

(…) the alliance is not reducible to individuals, and it is not individuals who act. The second is that action in alliance happens precisely between those who participate, and this is not an ideal or empty space – it is the space of support itself – of durable and liveable material environments and of interdependency among living beings.

Judith Butler: Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street, 2011TUMULT is driven by the kinaesthetic energy in the dancers’ movements. They create space when they attach a several meter long stretch fabric to themselves, each other and to a simple metal construction which both dancers and audience are seated in. The movement is not limited to the dancers, but spreads to the entire room and into the audience’s bodies when the dancers put their forces in. As in demonstrations, the focus of the performance is not on the individual body, but on the collective motion – of what occurs in the collective of moving together.

In TUMULT movements can thus be seen and felt, but they can also be heard. Mathias Friis-Hansen has created a soundtrack in which the specific sound of the carabiners, as the dancers fix them to the metal construction, is amplified to generate resonance in the rhythmic universe of the composition.