WORKS
From left: Yuichiro Inoue, Matt Waldie
BERLIN/TORONTO PROJECT (2010) 55 minutes
The Berlin/Toronto Project was produced in 2009 as part of TDT’s mission to bring fresh new ideas in contemporary dance to Toronto. It was conceived as the first installment of a series designed to highlight choreographers from important international arts centres. The series continues in 2011 with the Paris/Toronto Project.
In recent years, TDT has invited choreographers, teachers and performers from across Canada and abroad to Toronto to share their artistic visions, helping to provide a context for local work and contributing to a healthy and open creative environment by stimulating discussion – and sometimes controversy – in our audience and the Toronto arts community.
In this spirit, Berlin-based choreographers Felix Marchand and Christoph Winkler traveled to Toronto in the spring of 2009 to work with the company, each creating a new work that was presented, as part of a shared a program, for eight performances at the Winchester Street Theatre.
The choreographers produced radically different works, stretching the dancers in challenging new directions. Felix Marchand’s Awareness etudes for 6 performers and an audience, conceptually rigorous yet euphorically physical, was strongly influenced by his experience with Body-Mind Centering and various release techniques. Christoph Winkler’s The Toronto Files was structured around the real-life experiences of the dancers—he elicited movement phrases and stories from their personal histories, skillfully building a touching and very funny portrait of dance training and community.
While in Toronto, Marchand and Winkler also gave short workshops on their creative processes and participated in a series of discussions and lectures including The Process Revealed and post-performance talks. Other events, led by Berlin-based dramaturge and academic Susanne Foellmer, included a lecture on dance in Berlin and a panel discussion on dramaturgy of the body. Foellmer, Winkler and Marchand were able to engage with a wide cross-section of the dance community including artists, presenters, critics, educators and funders, developing a diverse knowledge of dance in Toronto and helping facilitate new links between Toronto and Berlin.
The Berlin/Toronto Project and its supporting activities were made possible with the support of André Thériault of Tanz im August, the Canadian Embassy in Berlin, and Toronto’s Goethe-Institut.
