Sustainability at tanzhaus nrw

Insects suffer from a questionable reputation among humans. They sting and bite, crawl into nooks and crannies and simply evoke disgust with their spindly legs, antennae and compound eyes, at least as far as general opinion goes. Yet many insects are decidedly beneficial and indispensable for the ecological balance. The "Bad Bugs" would like to oppose their oncoming, creeping doom. With their eponymously named band, they travel the country, fighting against the destruction of their habitats with a hard shell yet quite the soft core. They demand nothing less than our solidarity in the struggle against the destruction of natural habitats and allow the audience to participate in the transformation towards a diverse, vivid and liveable environment in which humans and animals can feel equally comfortable.

Solo performance Ocean Cage is anchored in the complex and soulful narrative of the Indonesian village of Lamalera and encompasses the entanglement between the whale, the fishing community, and the ancestors. The encounter with the sperm whale manifests the complex ecosystem interrelations and the basis of solidary community. This gathering is a simultaneous spiritual source as well as an ancestral connection, intertwined like the links in a chain wherein beginning and end lie indiscernible. Visitors are invited to dive into the delicate, silent, troubled ideological trench, to breathe and to dissolve into the porous and leaky bodies of the water, mammals, the fishing community, ballads, breezes, and spirits to reflect on inter-species relations and how we may redefine a new understanding more-than-human justice.

Punctures is a long-term project t the intersection of art and ecology by artists Alfredo Zinola, Micaela Kühn and Maxwell McCarthy, all three of them working in dance and choreography. For the Punctures X tanzhaus nrw action day  in April 2024, Düsseldorf experts for local habitats and biodiversity came together with neighbours, academy participants and the tanzhaus nrw audience to make a positive contribution to biodiversity, together, on the grounds of the house.

Do we humans have something in common with plants? At first glance, we are very different, but on closer inspection still, we do share many connections: We grow, we breathe, we need sun and fluids, we communicate and network, and we also actually depend on each other. What does the breath of a plant sound like? What about the rhythm when plants move? What does it sound like when they touch? Do they talk to each other? With two dancers and one vocalist, Grün explores the parallels between humans and plants as it researches the nature of their movements and blooming. Composer Jörg Ritzenhoff takes us into the sound world of plants and lets us experience their growth sounds. Together with the performers, the audience immerses themselves in the cosmos of plants.

How do we imagine the future of the coming generations? What feelings do these ideas trigger in us? What are we fighting for? And what hopes have we given up on? Based on interviews with parents and people who have decided against parenthood due to the climate crisis, Antje Velsinger / new trouble delivers these questions onto the stage in THEIR FUTURE.

Natural Drama talks about the body as a territory marked by concepts of nature and naturalness, questioning representations and constructions of the so-called female body. Sorour Darabi finds inspiration for this confrontation in the life and work of dancer Isadora Duncan and the Iranian princess, intellectual, writer, painter, feminist, and pioneer for women's rights Zahra Khanom Taj Saltaneh.

Please read more on environment and sustainability as shown in Natural Drama in the interview presented here.

Transdisciplinary group Fronte Vacuo, with members Marco Donnarumma, Margherita Pevere and Andrea Familari, works with performance as a social experiment. After a decade of individual work in the fields of visual arts, media, and performance, it was founded in Berlin in 2019 in response to the interplay of ecological destruction, socio-political polarisation, and technological progress. The complexity of these human-nature-algorithm entanglements is reflected in [ΣXHALE]'s formal approach. The play marks the third season of their long-term project Humane Methods in which the group takes a critical look at a world in which systemic intolerance, environmental destruction and immoral technological developments have created a pervasive structure of violence.

With Vástádus eana/The answer is land ,choreographer and director Elle Sofe Sara creates  a space for the complex and contradictory emotions that are triggered by the exploitation and destruction of our ecosystem. She poignantly dedicates this to the connections between humans and nature, the habitat we all share and the power that emerges when humans stand together as part of a community. The choreography takes its inspiration from demonstrations and activism, Sámi spiritual practice, and formation dance.

With Climatic Dances, Amanda Piña explores the planet’s current loss of  cultural and biological diversity. The choreographer particularly focuses on the ways in which our ideas of earth have changed over time and over the course of various historical genealogies and ontologies. The performance’s central point is the examination of a landscape taken from Amanda Piña's biography, a mountain in the central Chilean Andes, to be exact, which is being destroyed today by extremely critically discussed neo-extractivism – raw material extraction within the framework of a neoliberal market economy. In Climatic Dances, this mountain becomes a place from which suffering and anger can be shared, mourned, and lifted. Two dances from the northern Mexican Puebla highland, "Tipekajomeh" and "Wewentiyo", performed by the indigenous Masewal people in the context of climate change and excessive mining, form the starting point for a journey into the depths of this endangered mountain. A magical charging of what modern science calls "geology".