Ben J. Riepe
“I don’t like dance,” says Ben J. Riepe. The 29 year-old choreographer is serious: “The attitude, the affectation, the intrigues.” Dance has not yet realised its potential and is still hanging on to old ballet clichés. “Contemporary dance is all the same, simply awful,” he says scathingly, raising his voice a few decibels – not only because the Düsseldorf bar where we have met is filling up. “Contemporary training is a lie.” I beg your pardon? “There is no contemporary technique. The training is just entertainment for the dancer and gives you bad habits.
” As far as Riepe is concerned, only classical ballet has any legitimacy, and only in the rehearsal room, as a training method, not on stage: “It’s good training but it’s inartistic.” Four years ago the man speaking thus was an in-demand dancer and is now one of the biggest hopes of the contemporary dance scene. An aesthete, with his creations on the interface of dance theatre and installation, he has choreographed – sorry, staged – his way into the forefront of the young German vanguard.
It’s a question of definition. Riepe likes to blur the boundary with visual art. For him there are no separate categories. “I appreciate dance,” ...
Weiterlesen mit dem digitalen Monats-Abo
Sie sind bereits Abonnent von tanz? Loggen Sie sich hier ein
- Alle tanz-Artikel online lesen
- Zugang zum ePaper
- Lesegenuss auf allen Endgeräten
- Zugang zum Onlinearchiv von tanz
Sie können alle Vorteile des Abos
sofort nutzen
“That spring day in 1994 on the Croatian island Krk was one of the most special days in my life,” says Marko Peljhan. On this island in the Kvarner Gulf, where there were practically no tourists in the first half of the 1990s, he – together with a team of co-workers with whom he was contemplating his third performance – set off for a location marked only by a...
Urban Art is public art. Whether you are counting in sculptures in a park or a dance company’s act on a market place – art is examining our societal environment as well as our relationship with art and the real.
Of course, we dream – and how much the very word “dance” stirs the imagination – of a new Rimbaud who “stretches ropes from steeple to steeple,” or the...
The dance project Landing08 took place at St Olavs Hospital in Trondheim, Norway. Part festival, part context-specific series of performances and stunts, the coalition of dance artists aimed to produce dance specifically for this context. Nine performances and four installations varied between site-specific dances utilising the hospital’s architecture, space and...
