Contrasts

Year & Context

2016

Original Production

About the Production

Jacqueline Fischer, longtime dancer and choreographer for Düsseldorf’s THEATER DER KLÄNGE, created her second full-length programme in 2015/16. Following the acclaimed 2008 dance evening “Ich ist ein Anderer”, “Contrasts” turns to the question of freedom within performance-driven societies — freedom in the sense of a different cultural or ethnic background, or the freedom denied by illness, age, or lack of formal education.

The piece focuses on the individual: their origins, their surroundings, the tensions and contrasts that shape what they can do and who they are. The lightness of dance opens up a poetic space in which these themes can be approached with equal parts seriousness and metaphor. An international ensemble of performers from Germany, Greece, the USA, Chile, Japan and the Republic of Congo created an evening of music and dance theatre combining movement, song, video scenography and electronic music.

A thread of quotations — from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Søren Kierkegaard, from Andreas Gryphius to Friedrich Nietzsche — runs through the piece, sung by soprano Barbara Schachtner in settings by J.U. Lensing or projected across the back wall. Scene by scene, the colourful costumes of different homelands give way to uniform city dress: a compression that tips, at the end, into black mourning clothes. What the audience witnessed was a production that, for all its lightness of movement, never lost sight of its actual subject — being alone in the middle of a crowd.

“Comparison is the end of happiness and the beginning of discontent.” — Søren Kierkegaard

Funded by the Kulturamt der Landeshauptstadt Düsseldorf, the Ministry for Family, Children, Youth, Culture and Sport of the State of NRW, the Deutsche Multiple Sklerose Gesellschaft, the Stiftung van Meeteren and the Förderverein Klangtheater e.V.