ZOO JUTSU – Edition Düsseldorf

Inspired by Playfight* and the Playfight community, Kollektiv ZOO and Düsseldorf-based players develop a format between performance and game, searching for new shapes of dialogue, opening a forum of physical speaking. Movement practices such as fighting, playing, and skirmishing transport the group into an adventuresome and body-based communication far beyond spoken language. As a utopian space wherein issues, discourse, and facts are negotiated on a physical plane, the tanzhaus nrw Foyer will be transformed into a temporary skirmish arena that opens up as a learning facility and a blueprint for social dialogue, compromise, and dispute for the audience during the performances. The players who, for several weeks, collaborated with Kollektiv ZOO on the format, will compete in the Playfight* skirmish arena as fictitious characters in the game ZOO JUTSU – EDITION DÜSSELDORF.

The format confronts players and audience with physical boundaries in a playful way, putting the manglers into a body dialogue that blurs physical conditions and self-conceived rules with many variations. What moves this physical dialogue? What knowledge do we scrutinise? What rehearsed mindsets and which opinions will be wagered?

Kollektiv ZOO are Anja Plonka, Constantin Leonhard, and Jens Eike Krüger. The ZOO collages and intervenes in urban space and in theatre venues with everyday actions, choreographies, and casual material. They employ documentary means therein as well as installation and choreography. Discursive contradictions become accelerators for both plot and aesthetics. Their artistic explorations began with the choreographic potential of jarring, pulverising, corroding, and the breaking of furniture with everyday bodies. Since their 2016 Now & Next residency at tanzhaus nrw, they have been affiliated with the house. As up-and-coming artists, the collective holds membership in the choreographers’ association iDAS NRW. From 2017 on, the collective has been dealing with questions on protest and the barricades that evolve from it. Regarding this complex of themes, the Justus Liebig University Mainz invited the collective for a teaching assignment on the topic of “barricades”. In 2002, the collective staged interventions in the Wuppertal urbanscape as part of the Wohnen in der Politik (Living in Politics) project by cultural institution die börse. Also in 2020, the collective developed the performance Correspondence Network – a performative communication via scores and parcels with letters and materials, funded by the Reload stipend granted by the German Federal Cultural Foundation. The artistic and physical discussion with fighting as choreographic material and a form of dialogue has become a focus of their examinations since their first #TakeHeart residency at tanzhaus nrw in 2020.

Duration: ca. 90 min.

Registration for the tactile tour at ticketservice@tanzhaus-nrw.de

The booking of the workshop also includes a ticket to visit the ZOO-JUTSU event on 16,17 or 18.11.2023.