Fabula marks ECCE first collaboration with Unusual Symptoms, Belgian band Zwerm, as well as with drummer Karen Willems. Seven dancers and five musicians explore contradictory emotions in the face of the current state of the world, in a polyphony of voices. Anger and despair, joy and lust combine into a choreography of powerful sound and imagery, hinged between rock concert and opera. The prog-rock and psychedelia influenced sound on Zwerm’s current album “Great Expectations” encounters figures from Greek mythology and Italian writer Cesare Pavese’s texts that Claire Croizé contrasts with the dancers’ individual movement languages.
https://www.theaterbremen.de/de_DE/programm/fabula.1324916
Choreography
Claire Croizé
Created with and danced by
Paulina Będkowska, Gabrio Gabrielli, Maria Pasadaki, Nora Ronge, Andor Rusu, Young-Won Song, Csenger K. Szabó
Music
Zwerm & Karen Willems
Light Design
Jan Maertens
Costume Design
Anne-Catherine Kunz
Dramaturgy
Etienne Guilloteau
Assistant Directors
Leon Stille, Andy Zondag
Production Management
Anne Crevits, Alexandra Morales
Distribution
Carine Meulders, Gregor Runge
Assistant to Costume & Light Designer:
Andrea Künemund
Internship
Adela Maharani
Stage Manager
Ellen Uta Merkert
Production
Theater Bremen
Coproduction
Concertgebouw Brugge and ECCE
“The intellectual element within this music is dampened by the earthy dancers who present themselves as decidedly simple, even as they rise into a handstand from lying down or while they hold a headstand with arms prostrate. Around a pile of headlights, they dance as if around a fire, running barefoot with outstretched arms like children play-pretending to be planes. […] They hurl all their energies from their arms, forward onto the stage, before reconvening for processions and court dances. They are warriors, riders, hobbits, skidding face down, hustling through the audience as if the dance needed to simultaneously ooze and flow in everywhere – as music can do. What a concert.”
(Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung)
“The dancers […] are virtually exploding to this musical mixture, but they are also, at times, very focused on certain forms. And it was exactly this mix of extremely dynamic and impulsive movement qualities and music and the rather silent, subdued, formal elements in both music and dance that made me think so of those distinct choreographers from the Belgian scene: On the one hand of Teresa De Keersmaeker and, on the other hand, of that fellow Wim Vandekeybus, those are two such antipodes; and Claire Croizé unites that in her choreography.”
(Deutschlandfunk)
“On stage, there are musical islands in a half-circle, five points thus that each hold instruments as well as the musicians. Right in the middle is an artwork made of light that could well be an installation as well as an electric campfire; between them, the seven dancers romp about. And they do romp about quite a bit, dancing for and with themselves, with short, reoccuring moments of synchronous dance, too, something which I had not witnessed here on the Kleines Haus stage since an eternity ago, which served to remind me yesterday night that I attended a dance evening, not a concert in a small club.”
(Bremen Zwei)
“The electric guitar cuts its way through the ear canals, tugging and sobbing and twitching so you cannot help but follow it – like following the body that is translating those self-same sounds into dance. […] ‘Fabula’, the new dance production at Theater Bremen, now having celebrated its premiere at Kleines Haus, is exactly that – a communion of music and dance, of sound and bodies, of acoustic exhilaration and danced ecstasy; including the soft passages, of course.”
(Kreiszeitung)
“Wat een verademing om eens een volwaardig ensemble op een podium te zien. (…) Als de muziek dan bovendien live uitgevoerd wordt door een topensemble dat zijn eigen werk brengt, ben je de hemel te rijk.” Pzazz
(Pieter T'Jonck, Pzazz)
