Gintersdorfer/Klassen
created by Richard Siegal and Franck E. Yao
coproduction Ringlokschuppen Mühlheim and Frascati Producties
with the support of Mitteln des Landes NRW, Nationalen Performance Netzes aus Mitteln des Tanzplans Deutschland der Kulturstiftung des Bundes
Running time 1h 20’
National Première
Reservation required
Already guests at the 68th edition of the Festival d’ Avignon, Monika Gintersdorfen and Kurt Klassen present Logobi05. During over ten years the two artists have worked together in search of a new language that can turn survival economies and political turmoil in Côte d’Ivoire into dance, theatre and visual art language. Together they have formed a spontaneous and free partnership, stimulated by their mutual artistic independence. As opposed to a certain idea of the theatre that would have a director, for the duration of a play, thoroughly exploring a theme, Gintersdorfer/Klassen dare repetition and create a prolix and serial work to give the spectators the time to become familiar with their specific work process and to discover their protagonists. One of them is the dancer and choreographer Franck Edmond Yao alias Gadoukou the Star, who appears in the three plays presented in Avignon. In Logobi 05, he meets Richard Siegal, a contemporary choreographer and dancer. This play is an example of how to proceed from the group and is completely based on improvisation, the interpreters even refraining from repetitions from one night to another. But what is the “logobi”? An Abidjan street dance that, while impressing its spectators, transcribes the truths of daily life into movements. Starting from this cultural and social aesthetic base, a dialogue is created between current Ivorian dance and contemporary Western dance, during which the two acolytes talk, dance and compare their respective experience and humorously explore their differences.
Read the interview by Marion Siefert
Gintersdorfen/Klassen, biography
Gintersdorfen/Klassen
In Monika Gintersdorfer and Knut Klassen’s universe, there are several planets, a few satellites and a star that organizes the revolution of all of them. Since 2004, Monika Gintersdorfer and Knut Klassen have been gravitating around this energy and solar centre that is the show business milieu of Ivory Coast and its Parisian and German diaspora. She was initially a director in the major German national theatres; he is a plastic artist. Together, they have invented a spontaneous and free collaboration, stimulated by their mutual artistic independence. Light, reactive and iconoclastic, their theatre is inspired by concrete querying, artistic and economic survival strategies, political upheavals in Ivory Coast, and finds its language at the juncture of dance, theatre and the plastic arts, exploring a physical relationship to words. Their constellation of dancers, DJs and stars of coupé-décalé and Abidjan nightlife shares the stage with German performers, choreographers and dancers – two poles of radically different existences and aesthetics, the glamor and virtuosity of some vying with the discursiveness and humour of others. This encounter has given rise to a stimulating confrontation of experiences, as in Very Very Strong (2009), or the narrative of a huge slice of Ivorian history that resonated with contemporaneous German politics, or in Othello, Who’s He? (2009), which revisited a classic of Western theatre. Concerned with treating in the long run themes that are dear to them and that belong to the fields of politics, religion and show business, Gintersdorfer/Klassen favour producing series, which permits them to deepen artistic forms they have already experimented with.