Elsa Artmann / SANFTE ARBEIT

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Dance and audio play A Change is as Good as a Rest employs movement, music, and text to deal with the work-dictated rhythms in our lives as well as with our efforts to outsmart linear time. We become insecure whether we need more love or a break or a quiet minute or a sabbatical or a radical change or fresh air or a crash or a sharp brake to leave the ceaseless succession of reciprocally rhythmic activities that make up our everyday lives. Between remunerated/ unpaid, estranged/ identity-defining, relationship-related/ isolating work – how do we feel, when we work, if something is ending, that a time is slowly changing? How may we coexist if we do no longer concur on the time, when NOW does no longer happen for everyone all at the same time, when we have taken different junctions in time?

A Change is as Good as a Rest is the finale of a multi-play ongoing analysis of work in culture capitalism and coalesces them into this question: Of everything we experience as contradictory in our own practice (and its localisation) – what do we wish to continue with? What do we end with? Four dancers and one musician describe their own actions or their possible cessation and provide accessibility for a blind and visually impaired audience through superimpositions of text, sound, and movement.

Ensemble Elsa Artmann / SANFTE ARBEIT works dance-based on interdisciplinary formats that also include, apart from choreography, audio play and book publication, most recently developing in a direction of contemporary musical. Themes are viewed in movement, text, and voice; topics that initially leave us feeling powerless – like the nuclear family, living, nationalism, work – and they design “exercises for different conditions”. Since 2022, Elsa Artmann / SANFTE ARBEIT have been dealing with (emotional, care and relationship) work in culture capitalism through different formats (apart from stage plays also in audio dramas, a short film, and with a digital platform for collaborative writing). We understand our practice as documentary in a combined inspection of everyday experience and (medially) attested current affairs. In the transitions between language, sound, and movement, the Ensemble addresses the accessibility of their own work from different senses and perception levels. 

In German and English. Supertitles always in the other language.
Relaxed performance. With integrated audio description.

Duration: 70 mins.