CocoonDance Company / Rafaële Giovanola

CHOREIA grows from working with choir forms and searching for the space that has been lost for the choir and the community. CHOREIA faces the challenge of the historically grounded spatial division between stage and audience space. To overcome this, choir forms will be examined and new forms for space, sound, and body developed to bridge the physical distance. How can theatre as an institution become a living form of community? From a critical-historical perspective, community should not be thought of from the unity but rather from the difference of the singular individuals. To achieve this, CHOREIA uses the multi-voiced powers of unanimity and polyphony.

The Greek word choreia denotes the equitable singing, talking, and dancing of the people within the choir. With a large ensemble cast, a live DJ and sung elements, CHOREIA provides a voice to the dance. For the voice takes up an important role in CHOREIA when it negotiates the bodyless expansion of bodies in space and relations between groups and individuals.

Dealing with voice in its “body-like” qualities is a promising addition to CocoonDance’s research on the mental figure of the yet “unthought-of” body that has been ongoing since 2016. It contributes to the imagination of new and different embodiments and to relate them to yet other bodies.

Collective project CocoonDance was founded in 2000 by choreographer Rafaële Giovanola and dramaturge Rainald Endraß. The Baltimore-born Swiss citizen followed her studies with Marika Besobrasova in Monte Carlo first with a stint as a soloist in Turin before William Forsythe brought her to the Frankfurt Ballet for eight years, which was in turn followed by another fifteen years at Choreographisches Theater Freiburg and Bonn. Since 2004, the company has been playing the dance division at Bonn’s Theater im Ballsaal, a venue for producing artists, intersection, and sphere for different fields in contemporary dance. Among them are numerous projects of art agency and education such as the award-winning Junior Company Bonn. The driving force of the artistic development essentially lies in improvisation and ensemble work. Collective decision-making processes and an extraordinarily continuous teamwork constitute the works’ aesthetic density.