))dances of the anthropocene ((

 

WE WERE NEVER ONE

an embodied encyclopedia of the now

 

In WE WERE NEVER ONE, choreographer Karin Pauer creates a constantly transforming performance installation, in which sculptural elements and live performance coalesce. Embodied texts meet poetic images, human and more-than-human creatures interact. Four performers, a musician, and a visual artist bring to life a circulation of metamorphoses, where each ‘I’ learns that it is also a ‘We’.

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Humanity is realising how much everything is tied to everything else – how much we are connected with other people and the world around us. If not before, we learned this the hard way during the pandemic. In her performance installation WE WERE NEVER ONE, choreographer Karin Pauer develops a language of the present and of mindfulness, an ‘embodied language of nowness’, translating this new state of awareness into choreography and movement.

The realisation of our overall connectedness transforms into text, embodied thoughts, hybrid objects, haunted landscapes, sounds of extinction, and encounters in the moment of movement. This creates a practice by which we can learn to perceive our damaged planetary situation. WE WERE NEVER ONE is part of Karin Pauer’s series dances of the anthropocene, which challenges and examines our anthropocentric world view while at the same time trying to devise embodied practices of empathy and care.

 

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Credits:

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Artistic direction: Karin Pauer 

Artistic assistance: Arttu Palmio 

Performance, choreography: Anna Biczok, Arttu Palmio, Hugo Le Brigand, Karin Pauer 

Objects: Maureen Kaegi 

Sound: Paolo Monti/the starpillow / Record label Dissipatio Records 

Lighting design: Sveta Schwin 

Lighting technology: Nicholas Langer 

Costume design: Karin Pauer 

Production management: mollusca productions 

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A co-production by Kunstverein ARGO, brut Wien, and MDT Stockholm 
With the kind support of the City of Vienna’s Department of Cultural Affairs, the Federal Ministry of Art, Culture, Civil Service and Sport, and Life Long Burning – Towards a sustainable Eco-System for Contemporary Dance in Europe (2018–2022, funded by the European Union’s Creative Crossroads programme) as well as the „Workshop Foundation“ Budapest.

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