ALTERN
"Ageing" is a contemporary dance piece that explores the transformative nature of the ageing process, a universal experience that touches us all. Through a dynamic interplay between generations, this performance delves into the physical and emotional contrasts between youth and age, bringing the theme of ageing to life on stage.
Featuring four dancers from distinct generations, the piece highlights the exchange of knowledge and experience across ages, guiding the audience on a one-hour journey through the complexities of ageing. Immersed in evocative lighting, the performers explore where these qualities might lead us, raising thought-provoking questions about the sociological aspects of growing older.
The Children of Today
Using only renewable resources such as energy for simple lighting and sound, second-hand clothing and organic materials, „The Children of Today“ encourages people to step into a world where creativity and sustainability are connected.
At the centre of this science fiction-inspired journey is a performative duet that embodies famous personalities such as the dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, the Egyptian pharaoh Cleopatra VI and the dancer and choreographer Jérôme Bel, transcending the boundaries of time. Through simple yet repetitive movements, fantastic compositions unfold, leading to absurd and touching situations that ignite the imagination and challenge preconceived notions about our capitalist reality.
Acid the Opera
„Acid - The Opera“ is the performative part of more extensive research that uses the enquiry into different types of existence outside or through capitalism as the vehicle for inspiration, creation and expression.
It is inspired by the word Acid and its various meanings. It is a work in which Charles A. Washington, as a solo performer with friends (@darynadance), absurdly embodies different historical and present-day characters to explore the impossibility of non-linear time and other types of reality.
Post Ironic Moustache
Post Ironic Moustache is a contemporary dance piece that combines performance and drama in a cinematographic stage environment. Thematically inspired by the writings of the British cultural scientist MarkFisher, in particular the unfinished work of Acid Communism, in which he starts to unravel the neoliberal narrative that reaches a turning point in the late 60s, as means to consider how a post-capitalist society could develop. "Post Ironic Moustache" wants to deal with post-capitalism through embodiment and scenically. It questions what can be learnt from the spirit of the late 60s and how collective decision-making as a method to work can metaphorically stand for our society. Collectivitive living and the atomised individual are themes of the piece and our working methodology.
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Performing Maleness: Uncoding Me
Performing Maleness: Uncoding Me aims to engage in a breakdown of stereotypes of the masculine and feminine in our society, describing them performatively and exposing toxic maleness inherent in social structures. It also questions modes of existence and belonging in relation to gender and nationality. What role the overall societal understanding plays in an individual's "I", ultimately allowing for a critical examination of one's own identity? In this work, Charles Washington wants to question his own coming of age as an "I," his norms and values that have made him, as the protagonist of this play, who he is today. A white heterosexual man born in Scotland and living in Dresden. How does ethnic, social and cultural background determine who we are and how the individual sees himself? What else am I besides what is written on my passport? In this piece, choreographer and dancer Charles Washington will explore how this confrontation allows for a different form of male self-expression and how this can help our society reduce a diffuse fear of being female. This piece aims to take an explicit political stance and advocate for a more violence-reduced, feminist society.
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M ~ {Birnam Woods}
Is a work that is inspired by the collective neo-ritual practice of clubbing and the relationships that are created in these subcultures. Every club around the world is different in some way or form: the size or shape of the dance floor, the glasses the drinks are served in or the type of music the DJ’s plays every week, what influence does this have on the clubbers? what kind of subculture does this create? and are subcultures curated by event organisers through their careful design of the atmosphere and clientele of a club night?
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M ~{Birnam Woods} is a choreography that is informed by this and aims to generate its own weird and wonderful subculture that is self-generating and influenced by its own creation. It reveals two performers entwined in relationships that have been founded on this subculture where style, language, and community holds them together. In the darkness of the club where their perception has been warped by the intensity of the beat and the visual stimulation of colour and strobe lights. What has changed so deep inside them to perceive the world and each other in a way that grips them so deeply to do it all again the following week?
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