With works by caner teker & Bianca Mendonça

With this Double Bill for first productions at tanzhaus nrw, we would like to invite you to a double evening about human and non-human practices.

caner teker dedicates the premiere of KARADENIZ to the theatricality of Turkish wedding practices. We encounter them as rituals, as hetero- and homonormative social institutions, and finally as staged events with choreographed sequencing and traditional Turkish dances such as Halay or the Zeybek. With the aid of the “Köçek” character, the androgynous belly-dancer, infamous for his*her sex work, caner teker and accomplices will look at these references from a diasporic perspective. The audience will be invited as witnesses, to become part of a temporary community that seeks to transform oriental gaze relations into non-hierarchic witnessing.

LandScaping 0.2 - das unkartierte Land (The Unchartered Country) throws a choreographic glance onto human and non-human actors as well as onto the co-existence of humans and nature as creatures. In the interpersonal world of this dance piece, plants will become humanised, while humans become plantised. The cosmology of the Amazonian forms the starting point for the work on this piece, as explored by Bianca Mendonça during an in-situ research in her home country of Brazil in 2020. LandScaping ties into pre-colonial concepts of knowledge and living of the indigenous native population inhabiting these landscapes, reworking them in the context of contemporary performing arts. The result, developed in a collaborative process with a group of Germany-based artists, is a dance piece that develops a shared relation to nature as a creature.

caner teker, they, (born Duisburg in 1994) is a supporter*, survivor*, ally*, and lives in Amsterdam, Berlin, and Düsseldorf. After graduating as a master-class student from the Düsseldorf Arts Academy in 2019, caner teker has studied at the SNDO – School for New Dance Development. In 2019, caner teker showed a work in progress version of KIRKPINAR during Now  & Next at tanzhaus nrw, going on to premiere this piece at the 29^th Tanztage Berlin before receiving invitations to, among other formats, Favoriten Festival in Dortmund. caner teker received the Support Award for the Visual Arts of the City of Düsseldorf in 2020 and presented performances at the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen as well as at the Julia Stoschek Collection, as well as elsewhere.

Bianca Mendonça studied Scenic Arts and Theatre in São Paulo, choreography and performance in Stockholm and graduated with a master’s degree in dance agency at the Zentrum für Zeitgenössischen Tanz (Centre for Contemporary Dance) in Cologne. Bianca Mendonça has since been developing stage productions as well as research orientated projects, with performances in Germany, Brazil, and Australia. Following her last appearance at tanzhaus nrw during Now & Next in 2015, she now returns with the first instalment of her “LandScaping” trilogy about the Amazonian universe.

Duration: 150 min. incl. intermission

Attention: Use of loud music