14 August, 7 pm

Venue: Klosterruine, Klosterstraße 73a, 10179 Berlin

In English

Please register via pogobar@kw-berlin.de

With omnivore_excerpts the choreographer and visual artist July Weber and the musicians Fifi x Abortion present excerpts of a larger performative work in progress with which they engage into the concept of chimera: a term that relates to a mythological and a scientific phenomenon, a hybrid being between different animal and human bodies. The work looks at topics that can at first be understood as binary opposites, such as animals and humans, ancient and contemporary, nature and urban, trust and fear, improvisation and composition, death and birth, spirituality and rationality. However, the performers aim to examine the whole spectrum between these contrasting concepts in order to interact with possible gradations, ranging from coexistence to intersection.

Essential to the process is that rehearsals took place outdoors, in forests, under bridges and on construction sites. Through the exposing nature of these public surroundings, the rehearsal experiences informed and formed their bodies as well as the music and movement, rendering the artists as hybrids, or chimeras, with the environment. Concentrating on physicality and dancing, reducing and entering into raw states, being exposed and vulnerable, omnivore_excerpts tries to find a place of permeable independence: to discover realms in which one is open, sensitive and decisive simultaneously to the outside and inner(child).

Eventually the work aims to unravel the implications of translating the exposed outdoor experience into the protected frame of the institutional architecture in a theater-setting. In the Klosterruine x Pogo Bar edition of the work, the performers enter into another hybrid setting between inside and outside, old and new, research and performance, with committed playfulness.

July Weber is a choreographer/dancer, visual artist and set-designer. July studied sculpture at HBK Brunswick, Academy of Arts Vienna and choreography at HZT Berlin and the Theaterschool in Amsterdam. July’s work deals with spaces of interaction involving body, material and movement and is situated at the intersection of visual and performance art. In 2020 July founded NEW FEARS – a gallery for dance and performance in Berlin Wedding.

Fifi x Abortion meld together brains and bodies, while searching for red tension, and tender bliss when they play together. They draw from their backgrounds in hip-hop, electroacoustic, free improvisation, different kinds of Tanzmusik, punk, and metal to create trippy, intense sonic vibes to physically communicate with other bodies.

In the summer months of 2022, Klosterruine and Pogo Bar join forces and merge their love for performative practices in order to present a series of three events in the ruins of the Franziskaner-Klosterkirche.

Klosterruine x Pogo Bar is a unique collaboration between the Klosterruine Berlin and the Pogo Bar of KW Institute for Contemporary Art, curated by Sofie Krogh Christensen, Léon Kruijswijk and Christopher Weickenmeier. The events will take place in the Klosterruine in Klosterstr. in Berlin-Mitte during June, July and August.