Tag: Dorothea Rust

Switzerland
www.dorothearust.ch

Dorothea Rust works in/with dance, improvisation, performance art, live actions, and installation. She is the curator of a diverse range performance events in collaboration with other artists including Der Längste Tag/The Longest Day (an annual 16-hour event of non-stop performances) and music groups like GNOM gruppe für neue musik baden (group for contemporary music). 

She attended the Zurich University of the Arts graduating with a Degree in Visual Arts Studies (2003) and a Masters in Advanced Studies in Cultural/Gender Studies (2006). From 1983 to 1991, she worked in New York City collaborating with other dancers, choreographers and musicians where the experimental spirit (and some of the key players) of the Judson Dance Group of the 60s were still present. She took training programs in Classical Ballet, Limon Technique at the Limon Center, Cunningham  Technique at the Merce Cunningham Studio, Contact Improvisation, Improvisation & Composition, Releasing Work, with various artists and teachers such as Alfredo Corvino, Eva Karczag (member of Trisha Brown-Company), Dana Reitz, Deborah Hay, Elaine Summers, Simone Forti, members of the Meredith Monk Company and others.

Her performance work has been presented in performance art, dance and gallery contexts in festivals and other events in Switzerland, Canada, Chile, India, and Israel; an dyer dane work has been presented in Philadelphia,  Washington and New York City (St. Mark’s Church, Knitting Factory, P.S. 122), Germany, Portugal, Finland and more. Recent work has been presented at BRISE°3 Performance Art Festival Flensburg/Augustenborg (2015) and KIPAF Kolkata International Performance Festival India (2015).

FADO Performance Art Centre is proud to present new solos performance works by Victoria Gray (UK) and Dorothea Rust (Switzerland) in the context of the on-going International Visiting Artists series. Dorothea Rust and Victoria Gray’s appearances in Toronto are presented in partnership with VIVA! Art Action, the next stop on the artists’ tour. Established in 2006, VIVA! Art Action is an international performance and live art festival presented once every two years in Montréal.

Ballast by Victoria Gray

“An action may be gentle, but it is not benign.” ~Victoria Gray

Often durational, Victoria Gray’s performances utilize slowness and stillness, in conjunction with performing unsighted, bringing a cellular-attention to kinesthetic sensations. Integrating affect studies, process philosophy, political theory, and somatics, her work aims to bring dormant psychosomatic memory to consciousness. Specifically, that which subsists at the sentient level of the bones, muscles, organs, fluids, glands and nerves. This cellular-attention aims to disturb “common-sense” hierarchies of sensory organization, activating the political potential of a body that is intimately attuned to affective experience. Each work is highly contingent upon the audience’s particular presence and the specificities of each performance space. In this sense, like time, affect becomes a material in performance, it is “shaped” moment-by-moment in an immediate exchange between performer, audience and site. 

Übung / Exercise No. 6 – Gender – Render by Dorothea Rust

My (our) languages is (are) (long ago already) ramified: expanding to technological documentation and medias of expression, onto the handling with objects, including music, sound, text and movement/choreography and probably more to come. Thus constantly throwing another (new) light onto the relationship and my (our) being with others present or absent in a (different) space/place, be it audience, visitors, co-performers. 

I don’t consider performance as an ephemeral, singular event, disappearing like a soap bubble. I see it as a space and a ‘milieu’ [The term ‘milieu’ refers to Jean-Luc Nancy in: Sybille Krämer: Medium, Bote, Übertragung – Kleine Metaphysik der Medialität, 2008 , pages 54 – 66], me (us) moving in it, being part of a flow, of a social, cultural environment, hence performance an  incident, an intervention, a disturbance, a time/moment in a process … 

Any kind of preparation and processing before and after – such as script, notation, documentation, narration, photos, video, audio – can function as a possible trace which can become again a script and material for the next performance, a new intervention, disturbance etc., like Ariadne’s thread in a labyrinth with many exits, which is picked up not only by me, but by others. Thus the performance doesn’t belong to me, it’s part of a ‘milieu’, others as much belonging to it and being part of it as me.

Image © Dorothea Rust, Übung / Exercise No. 6 – Gender – Render, 2015. Photo Henry Chan.