Dancing on air

By Anna Semenova-Ganz

Long fade out reveals the figures of performers, one after another they become visible to the eye. With constant low resonating sound as a background a man with the trumpet makes noise and fills the space with vibrations, at the same time the choreography reflects the decoding processes of invisible signals, the spectator cannot read them, but they are definitely present.

Performance-duo SKILLS (Camilla M. Fehér and Sylvi Kretzschmar) presents their new piece “FIELD”, the sound- and choreography-based work, which is inspired by environmental research of former field station Teufelsberg. The traces of surveillance are still present in the decaying building of US-secret services in West-Berlin, built on the leftovers of destroyed in WWII houses, nowadays these abandoned ruins are the museum of graffiti, home of eco-community and three huge domes for absent antennas on the top of the roof demonstratively erected towards East-Berlin. History, politics, new rituality and trends are layered in Teufelsberg, as well as in the performance “FIELD”, which explores the relations between
them.

The field station on the stage is marked as a reference to analogue technologies of surveillance with the transmission and decoding of sound-signals before the Big Data, performers are marching down to the military origin of both: signal transferring and electronic technologies and exploring the destructive side of it. Few music stands, which could be read as antennas or detectors, a lot of ceramic plates - some of them will be broken - and drums together with microphones create the minimalistic scenography of the piece.

After few faces of estrangement in their researched-based work, SKILLS created the choreography combined with concert electronic music and singing. Mixing German and English in their jam - or clash - the performers don’t aim to make the language-based communication clear (sometimes it drowns in noise), they just put the audience in the center of the signal transferring.

The sound solutions of performance might seem too radical for sensitive ears without earplugs, few times they have really reached the border of the audio-tolerance. This aggressive sound effect attacks and brings recognizable atmospheric translation to the power of spy-technologies and its relation to fragile human physicality. One may literally hear that.