Community of Reception , Wie noch nie (Like never before)

What does it mean to bite tenderly? Do you move through the world baring your teeth or wearing a broad grin? Can I hold the weight of your finger between my teeth? Or even your arm?

BEISSEN is a dynamic, multisensory collage of biting choreographies, participatory explorations of chewing involving the audience, and poetic torrents of words about teeth. What draws us to biting is an interest in the point where tenderness meets danger.

We unfold a choreographic encyclopaedia of biting: from teeth falling out in nightmares and tongues exploring gaps left by baby teeth, to Carmilla, the vampire who came before Dracula, Nosferatu and Edward Cullen. We explore teeth and jaws as part of body language – in the playful tussles of matriarchal hyenas, the mutual grooming of wild horses, or the way feline parents carry their young in their mouths.

What power, what generative anger resides in our jaws? What kinds of care and tenderness can we explore through biting? And what memories, images and sensations surface when we approach biting through dance, language and the body?

Sabine Kuxdorf, Meret König and Valentin Schwerdfeger work collaboratively, shifting and blending their artistic roles as they search together for movements, words and associations. They call their working method “Sodastream”: a free-flowing, pleasure-driven process of experimentation from which new connections and choreographic ideas continually bubble up. The result is a shared performance space in which biting can be many things: wild and tender, comic and threatening, familiar and unexpectedly intimate.

Sabine Kuxdorf is a dancer, co-creator, access dramaturg and writer. In BEISSEN, she is interested in how different phenomena of biting can be explored together with the audience, and how language and physical expression can evoke memories. She is particularly keen to investigate her own practice as a dancer and to develop choreography collaboratively within the trio, working as both dancer and choreographer. She is interested in exploring which improvisation techniques can be experimented with collectively, bringing different perspectives into the process.

Meret König is a physical theatre artist, co-creator, dramaturg and writer. Meret is interested in chains of association that emerge through shared experimentation and lead to unexpected places. What conditions make free association possible in a way that feels comfortable and open? What methods might make this process playful and pleasurable? Meret is fascinated by the many different images that biting conjures in the mind, and by the deeply subjective nature of the subject. There is also the intimacy of approaching one another through dance and biting: teeth against skin, saliva on clothing.

Valentin Schwerdfeger is a physical theatre artist, co-creator, dramaturg and writer. He is interested in intense physicality and methods of embodiment. What images, energies and gestures emerge when we embody, for example, snapping wild horses or a wisdom tooth just before its surgical removal? He is also interested in combining descriptive language with humour and poetry, while maintaining an emotional connection to what is unfolding.

“I was born and grew up here, but people see me as a foreigner. I know that I am a foreigner.” Three women share an experience: they feel neither entirely here nor entirely there – neither unequivocally German nor fully belonging elsewhere, but somehow in between.

Dazwischen explores belonging and the tension between how we perceive ourselves and how others perceive us. Who decides where we belong? How does our sense of self change under the gaze of others? And what happens when the people we encounter categorise us primarily on the basis of our outward appearance?

The three artists approach these questions from different perspectives. Their personal experiences come together in an artistic exploration of prejudice, ethnic ascription and both internal and external boundaries. They are also interested in how these experiences become inscribed in the body: how does a body change when it is categorised from the outside?

Sound, rhythm, vibration, touch and proximity become starting points for a performance in which sight is not a prerequisite for experiencing what unfolds. Everyday situations in which prejudice and assumptions become tangible are re-enacted, transformed and abstracted throughout the creative process. Language and associations are translated into movement and physical expression. In this way, a shared space of experience emerges, bringing different perceptions into dialogue and opening up new possibilities for storytelling.

Dazwischen is a personal and emotional exploration of who we are allowed to be, who we are expected to be – and who actually gets to decide.

Nesmiye Önler brings her perspective as a blind artist into the collaborative development of Dazwischen. “As a blind person, I experience movement, space and other people differently from many sighted people. I want to contribute this perspective as a way of perceiving and as an opportunity to rethink dance and storytelling.” She wants to explore how a performance can emerge “when sight is not the starting point”, and to be part of a performance “that does not need to be seen in order to be experienced”.

Hannah Emami is studying for a Master’s degree in Dance Studies at the Centre for Contemporary Dance (ZZT). Since taking part in an introductory workshop on creative audio description, she has been interested in blind dramaturgy and accessibility in artistic processes. Through this project, she wants to explore these subjects in greater depth and gain first-hand experience that can enrich her future research.

Clara Saad takes her experience in theatre to a new level through Dazwischen. Meeting Nesmiye Önler has changed her perspective on the world and opened up new ways of seeing and understanding it.

What does our gut feeling tell us? And how does it shape our thoughts, decisions and actions?

Kopfkino des Bauchgefühls explores intuition: a form of knowing that we cannot always explain rationally, yet choose to follow. We get a feeling about a situation, make a spontaneous decision, or seem to know what is right for us without being able to say exactly why. But how reliable is this knowledge? And what happens when we act on it?

Thoughts, feelings and intuitive impulses become starting points for movement, sound, language and music. The three artists explore how choreographic material emerges from physical, auditory and cognitive impulses, and how these different modes of perception influence, transform and generate one another.

Movement, sound and language do not simply explain one another after the fact. They encounter and overlap with one another, repeat themselves and set one another in motion. Instruments, loopers, microphones, spoken word and rap meet embodied experience. Through layering and transformation, new rhythms, images and stories emerge.

The audience, too, becomes part of this exploration. Through different forms of interaction, audience members can contribute their own impulses and experiment with intuitive decisions in real time. A rope or other connecting elements can open up tactile experiences. The aim is not to identify a movement as precisely as possible or to understand something correctly. Instead, the focus is on feelings, states, stories and each person's own perception.

Kopfkino des Bauchgefühls approaches intuition not only as a subject, but also as an artistic method. The performance invites us to trust our own sensations while exploring their fallibility. A space emerges in which there is no right or wrong, only the invitation to perceive, interpret and be surprised by what unfolds between body, sound and thought.

Yasha Müller contributes as a performer working across dance and sound/music, as well as an access dramaturg, bringing his perspective as a visually impaired person into the collaborative process. He is particularly interested in the interplay between different modes of perception and in how bodies, thoughts and sound influence one another. “Music can emerge intuitively while also triggering feelings, images and impulses to move. Through repetition, layering and transformation, it can continue to evolve. Using loops, voice, instruments and movement, I want to explore how these interactions can become tangible in performance, and how they might give rise to a dramaturgy that is not conceived primarily through the visual.”

Khadidiatou Bangoura is a sighted dancer, choreographer and director of KHARABA & GUESTS. Since 2023, she has been exploring dance as a practice, and dance performances as an art form, that can be made accessible to blind and visually impaired people. Her aim is to make dance emotionally and narratively accessible through different sensory experiences and modes of engagement, including the creation of chains and nodes of perception.

Daniela Riebesam is a sighted performer who brings her experience as a dancer and audio describer into the collaborative process. She is particularly interested in the interplay between language and movement, and in how dance can be experienced through different modes of perception. “In this project, I want to explore how movement, language, sound, emotion and atmosphere relate to one another, and how these relationships can give rise to a form of dance that opens up a shared space of experience. A space in which different ways of perceiving the world have room to exist, and in which trust in our own intuition can grow.”