Choreography, Dance, Media
so soft and the sun is an ongoing research project by dancer and choreographer Jascha Viehstädt. With artists from the fields of dance and performance, software development, space, fashion, sound, graphics and photography, material is generated and collected from fragmentary thoughts and associations on a complex of themes, which is titled with two words and from there opens up to a variety of relevant topics:
Ever kissed a thousand times? Two dancers don’t mince their words and try it. Somewhere between fun, frustration and, above all, effort, their lips become dry and kissing becomes a completely new thing: conventions, gender and lame prejudices dissolve and draw a rather strange movement portrait of devoted touching. From South-East Asian incantations to Western hypersexualisation, everything is there and transforms into a jungle of images and movement before the audience’s eyes (＠_＠).
Choreography & Dance: Raymond Liew Jin Pin, Jascha Viehstädt
Costume: Signe Koefoed
Stage & Media: Balz Isler
Mentoring: Nico Grüninger
Funded by
K3 | Tanzplan Hamburg
Explore Dance Network
Touring Infos
2 persons on stage | 3 person total | available from April 2022 for international touring
For further informations and requests please contact via https://explore-dance.de/produktionen/1000-kisses/
In Deep.Dance, a team of international artists replaces itself with an artificial intelligence. A complete choreography, created by an artificial neural network that they programmed, is executed down to the last detail by three dancers. The strangely familiar movements open up an emphatic view into the hyper-logical world of code and confront the viewers with a construct that is accessible to few people and yet determines our future.
“…threateningly successful interplay of artificial conceptual and human-bodily-motor intelligence…”
Robert Matthies, 26.06.2021, taz
The Hamburg based choreographer Jascha Viehstädt creates a silent and soft world of statistically predetermined movements that makes tangible what it means to have human creativity computed by a machine. In this way, the uncompromising simplicity of the piece offers an insight into the basic mechanisms of software and machine learning and questions the hopes and fears that are projected into the development of artificial intelligence.
Choreography, Artistic Direction Jascha Viehstädt AI Development, Coding, 3D Design Erik Kundt, Lea Schörling AI Development, Coding Nikolas Zöller Dance, Creation Girish Kumar, Lisa Rykena, Raymond Liew Jin Pin Stage Takaya Kobayashi Outfit Mia Wittenhaus Dramaturgy Felix Meyer-Christian Outside Eye Chikako Kaido Graphic Design, PR Julia Löffler, Lukas Besenfelder Technical Direction Erik Kundt Produktionsleitung Jascha Viehstädt Video Thomas Oswald Photography Marcus Renner Production Assistant Nika Viehstädt
Funded by
Fonds Darstellende Künste AUTONOM
Behörde für Kultur und Medien Hamburg
Hamburgische Kulturstiftung
Touring Infos
3 persons on stage | 7 person total | available from July 2021 for international touring
In this choreographic installation the Berlin group Costa Compagnie with the dancer and choreographer Jascha Viehstädt and the director and artist Felix Meyer-Christian, as well as with the participation of the actresses Katharina Shakina, Helen Wendt, deal with the physical and spatial dynamics of global independence movements. Also in the team is the Catalan dancer and performer Montserrat Gardó Castillo, who has been following the conflict about independence and identity in her home city for years. Body images along the freedom of dissent, of isolation, loss, departure, aggression and solidarity are combined with a sound landscape of noises, sounds and language-fragments from the research conducted by Costa Compagnie in Great Britain, Bavaria, Catalonia and Southern Sudan. In this performance, movement and sound are condensed into a world of associations surrounding the audience.
Performance, Co-Creation Montserrat Gardó Castillo, Katharina Shakina, Helen Wendt Choreographie, Performance Jascha Viehstädt Artistic Director, Research Felix Meyer-Christian Composition, Soundart Marcus Thomas Programming, Video Erik Kundt Dramaturgy Marc-Oliver Krampe Production Management Franziska Merlo Photo & Video Documentation, Editor Thomas Oswald
A production by Costa Compagnie in cooperation with the State Theater Nuremberg and the State Theater Oldenburg, as well as the Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art
Funded in the Fonds Doppelpass by the Federal Foundation of Culture
Kindly supported by INVR.SPACE
In a landscape of superimposed movements, Tableau shows the canon in a physical interpretation. By duplicating and overlapping a solo, it searches for the cohesion between individual movements and for the expansion and distortion of the original material.
Together with the experimental multi-instrumentalist Aidan Baker and the scenographer Takaya Kobayashi, a moment arises that uses the old, musical form of the canon as a portrayal of the modern mania of permanent connection. Much like a moving Tableau Vivant, the work invites an immersion in the rhythm of repetitive fragments while simultaneously questioning their exposure.
Concept, Choreography Jascha Viehstädt Creation, Performance Julia B. Laperrière, Raymond Liew Jin Pin, Robin Rohrmann, Pauline Stöhr Stage, Costumes Takaya Kobayashi Music, Composition Aidan Baker Dramaturgy Signe Koefoed, Balz Isler Horn Musicians, Kartini Suharto Martin (Hamburg), Sakura Koyama (Berlin) Assistance Verena Brakonier Manufacturing Karsten Witte – Schlosserei Kampnagel, Anna Bräuninger – Alles von Hand Recording
Video Philipp Gysin, Sidney Nwakanma Thanks to Lani Tran Duc, Anika Marquardt, Costa Compagnie – Felix Meyer-Christian, Zahava Rodrigo, Miguel Murrieta Vásquez, Boutique Bizarre
Funded by
Ministry of Culture and Media Hamburg
Hamburgische Kulturstiftung
In Cooperation with
Sprechwerk Hamburg
Ballhaus Ost Berlin
DfdK Hamburg
Touring Infos
4 persons on stage | 6 persons total | available for international touring
MERMAID is an attempt to create a monster. Two performers unfold in a dancing symbiosis the movement potentials of cohesion and fusion of two bodies that function as one. They examine the figure and story of the mermaid in terms of its historical and contemporary significance and explore the question of what makes this hybrid of human and fantasy as attractive as inseparable.
In a macro-soundscape by Czechoslovakian field recording artist Slavek Kwi, a dance piece develops that formulates an appeal to the lust for imagination and in which questions of personal identity, belonging, gender, partnership and the mechanisms of social tolerance find a subtle mirror.
Concept, Choreography, Performance Raymond Liew, Jascha Viehstädt Supervision Isabelle Wapnitz, Signe Koefoed Music Slawek Kiwi Coproduction LOFFT Theater Leipzig, P-Bodies Festival Leipzig
Supported by Goethe Institut Malaysia, DPAC Theatre Kuala Lumpur, PASSION MA Artistry
Touring Infos
2 persons on stage | 2-3 persons total | available for international touring
For this work, the artists alongside programmers found a way to have an ongoing dramatic live-dialogue with Google Home, while also turning their stage into a “smart stage”, with Google Home controlling the lights and sound of the performance.
As within a world in transition to a data economy, the newly released „Google Home“ device, similar to science-fiction movies, allows for continuous conversation with Google’s servers. The language-based assistant can be assigned tasks permanently, while collecting behavioral data of its users from all spheres of life.
With “OK, GOOGLE” by Costa Compagnie the festival starts at the height of the time. The dance performance takes on the interaction of man and machine. (…) “OK, GOOGLE” is a good example of the enjoyable degree of professionalization that the independent theater scene has reached beyond the state theaters.
Hamburger Abendlatt, 09 April 2019
OK, GOOGLE designs a scenario of the near future. On the frontier of real and virtual reality, the performers seek an intensifying and confrontational live-online-dialogue with the artificial but present digital actor. In reference to the rituals of ancient theater, the artists question the coming coexistence with the most intelligent being of the future at the time of its creation. Utopian projections for the deconstruction of gender and body images emerge, as well as thought experiments on cyborgs and the imagination of loss of control in the post-human era. Can a truly empathetic moment arise between a human and artificial intelligence? How do our perceptions, emotions and our physicality change through a technoid everyday practice? And will the self-learning machine be the better human being of tomorrow?
Director, Research Felix Meyer-Christian Choreography, Performance Jascha Viehstädt Performance, Co-Creation Martin Hansen / Kyle Patrick, Frank Koenen, Regina Rossi, Kianí Del Valle Stage, Costumes Eylien Koenig Programming, Set-Up AI, Video Erik Kundt Music Katharina Pelosi, Matthias Reiling (Session Victim) Outside Eye Melmun Bajarchuu Camera Operator Arend Krause, Miguel Murrieta Vásquez, Thomas Oswald Sound Patrick Dadaczynski, Marcus Thomas Edit, Color Stéphanie Morin, Miguel Murrieta Vásquez Assistant Art Dept. Florence Schreiber
A production by Costa Compagnie in cooperation with Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof.
Supported by the Hamburg Culture and Media Board, the Hamburg Culture Foundation and the Fonds Darstellende Künste with funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media
Touring Infos
5 persons on stage | 9 persons total | available for international touring
No words. A long, loud night. Pictures of naked and dissolving bodies on gleaming surfaces. The question arises, how to be naked within a hypersexualised adulthood. Or if our clothes provide us with a sense of real freedom. Focusing on the coexistence of an adult strangeness and rough simplicity especially found in comics, a collage and episode oriented dance piece develops. By using the emotional mechanisms of comic art, music and dance, the work encompasses the right to be shameless through probably exhausting and sweat-inducing rehearsals.
Concept / Choreography Jascha Viehstäd Dance David Vossen, Philipp van der Heijden Music Tobias Hanel Stage Hou Hsui-Ying Dramaturgy / Supervision Balz Isler / Signe Koefoed Mentoring Reinhild Hoffmann
Supported by Hochschule für Schauspielkunst „Ernst Busch“ Berlin, Universität der Künste Berlin, Hochschulübergreifendes Zentrum Tanz Berlin, Uferstudios Berlin
Touring Infos
3 persons on stage | 5 person total | touring on request
Full video documentation on request > contact
In their first joint stage work, the four dance-, and media artists from Hamburg and Berlin deals with the complex terminology of space and time and translate these into social phenomena such as fear, freedom and oppression. They look to the aesthetics of horror and show an installation / situation of media harassment.
Video Balz Isler (CH, Berlin) Sound Lvis Mejía (Mexico, Hamburg) Dance Signe Koefoed (DK, Berlin), Jascha Viehstädt (Hamburg, Berlin)
Funded by
Hamburgische Kulturstiftung
Rudolf Augstein Stiftung
In cooperation with
Kampnagel – International center for finer Arts, Hamburg
Inter-University Centre for Dance Berlin, Berlin
Touring Infos
3 persons on stage | 5 person total | touring on request
Full video documentation on request > contact