Lydia Sonderegger

Piece

Today the present means crisis. Chaos no longer just seems to mean a state of exception, but a “model” for the future that is as threatening as it is inevitable. Chaos instils fear. In opposition to the idea of an exclusive threat, Khaos is an ambivalent figure in Greek antiquity. It combines a wide variety of levels of meaning: gape, chasm, abyss, precipice. But it also names the horizon of expansion, immensity, breakup, or opening. As formless form, striving toward something different than it already is, Khaos invokes the dimension of becoming, of possibility, of renewal.

In KHAOS Laurent Chétouane brings together four dancers and three musicians to explore the possibilities of Khaos at the edge of chaos. Music by Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Rihm and John Cage resounds on stage, marking an affinity with the uncontrollable. The “turbulence zones” in and between the musical pieces are the starting points for the emergence of unstable, threatening, destructive spaces, to which the performers and the audience alike are exposed. The traditional vertical axis of dance loses its visual organizing power and the floor is the only thing that offers a foothold in these spaces without fixed vectors and coordinates. Exposed to the possibility of crashing, of losing, of fear and mourning, the dance becomes an autonomous doing and becoming, a state without goals or any predictable time axis. A body emerges that must discover new relations to the other, to space, to itself, in order not to fall completely victim to the blind and disparate forces of contingent openness. The risk of chaos dissolving the order of the one world is tested out in KHAOS as the chance to create multiple worlds – an attempt at a utopian present. 

​

​

Costume

For the musicians` costumes I chose to use exclusively cast-off clothing found on the street. We found them all in one morning left out on the pavement in the Berlin districts of Wedding and Neukölln. I thus set up a condition that exposed me to a certain randomness and forced me to let go of control over the creation of the costumes up to a certain point. Chaos has as much to do with the loss of structure as with the structure itself. These two approaches meet in the costume design. Unlike the musicians` costumes, those of the dancers are uniform and precisely fashioned.