machine of grace Ø3

@ Marion Borriss

“Machine of Grace”*

I want to show you —yes, you— the perfect exuberance of my object and fix your attention to its rounded brightness (until it pulverizes your eyes).

Duration: 60 min

Dates: 9th and 10th of December 2017

Venue: Studio 14. Uferstudios

One can try, and say, that computers provide us with access to the internet, to tools we use every day without even noticing anymore, to unlimited information, to social networks, but this catalog would be incomplete. Perhaps the only way to gesture at what computers actually provide us with is to say that we cannot imagine contemporary life without them; the two have become a single mobius strip. This mobius strip is somewhat ambivalent, because it contains and integrates both freedom and control as a paradoxical same. In the work Machine of Grace, this opposite image is extended metaphorically into freedom and slavery, domination and devotion, pleasure and pain, the archaic and the futuristic, the animalistic and the prosthetic. And far from being a reference to an innocent who is suffering at the hands of technology, the appearance of restriction or submission is always complicated by other images of sensuous pleasure.

A very physical performance is created full of images of superimposed opposites, inviting to experience a physical human-computer interaction which is out of the ordinary. The images evoked with the body, voice, a computer and computer charger, point in the direction of issues that concern the computer apparatus, but do not confront it directly with an antagonistic stance. Instead, this images work at the level of “What if…”.

Choreographic Collaborations: Valentina Aviani (space and choreography), Marcelo Bizzarri (acting and work with object), Lea Kieffer (improvisation and dramaturgy), Camila Malenchini (choreography)

Light design: Annegret Schalke

Coachings: Johanna Peine (voice), Ulrike Sowodniok (voice), Dasniya Sommer (choreography and rope technique).

Video: Ailin Formia (shooting), Johanne Merke (art and performance)

Mentors: Lea Kieffer, Sophia New

Music: David Lynch I want you;, Frederick Delius Song of Summer, Murcof Cosmos II

Text: Kai Evans

Direction, costume and performance: Alejandro Karasik

Machine of Grace is the Final Presentation Show of the MA Solo/Dance/Authorship. HZT Berlin.

Thanks to Magdalena Meindl, Lyllie Rouviere, Kai Evans, Judith Foster, Benjamin Schälike, and Michelle Moura for their advice, Deva Schubert for haircut.

*The title is partly taken from Richard Brautigan’s poem ”Machines of Loving Grace” (1967)