Lydia Sonderegger

A beat, like the heartbeat of a restless animal, pulses through the dimly lit room. Six figures emerge tentatively out of the shadows. They look familiar and yet there is something alien about them: adrift in a state of forgetting. Their movements are hesitant, branded by an archaic fear but their touch betrays a desire to come into contact with one another, to be close.

In her new choreography Ah! Oh! A contemporary ritual for six dancers, the Berlin based choreographer Kat Válastur zooms into a post-apocalyptic society that bears clear traits of our current lives. This portrait tells of a society where everyone is out for themselves and yet is still driven by the desire for an overarching sense of community. Out of the ruins of the past, the lost figures venture a tentative closeness. But how to make a new start? How will this 'Newtopia' end?

Inspired by the circular formation of round dances as the expression of ritual dances from antique societies to the contemporary orient, Válastur creates a Utopian rite for the society of tomorrow. She skillfully unleashes a game of proximity and distance, doubt, hope, fear and desire on the bodies of the performers in which the small gesture of assistance ushers in the dawn of a new era.