Meg Stuart: Auf den Tisch!/At the Table! March 25, 2011

Bay Area Premiere

“Everybody on- and offstage constructs their reality at every moment. What fascinates me are the inevitable holes in these realities: that other people don’t easily fit into our scripts, or circumstances force us to improvise. In every performance there are hidden layers being revealed.”
Meg Stuart

Auf den Tisch! (which means “to put things on the table”) is an improvisation project by internationally acclaimed dancer/choreographer Meg Stuart. The setup is a large table with four microphones that the audience and performers sit around. As the performers begin to improvise -- singing, playing, dancing, talking, sometimes “on stage” (on the table) and sometimes not – the lines between performers and audiences begin to blur and the experience becomes a collaboration or negotiation where everyone has to “put things on the table” and work through the situation together. With an ever-changing cast of performers, thinkers, musicians, dancers, visual artists and audience members, each performance is a unique experience. The cast for the YBCA performances include next to Meg Stuart well-known San Francisco performer and choreographer Keith Hennessy, collaborator and composer Hahn Rowe and several other artists.

Public program:

Somewhere in Between
By Pierre Coulibeuf
Post-show discussion with Jesse Hewit

Sat, Mar 26, 2 pm
YBCA Screening Room
FREE

An experimental 74 minute film-portrait that transposes the research of choreographer Meg Stuart into fiction, Somewhere in Between recreates the behaviors and gestures of individuals in everyday life – the strange or unusual attitudes of a couple of unconventional figures; of two girls in their flat; of a couple in a half-destroyed house; of a girl in an underground parking garage, and another who wants to settle in Switzerland and live out more or less traumatic experiences. Suggesting the vagueness of place, identity, and relationships, the film is a reflection on the body’s posture in the everyday life of individuals, examining how choreographic work feeds on routine social and individual behaviors. Following the film screening of Somewhere in Between, join local performance artist Jesse Hewit as he moderates an informal discussion about the film, contextualized by Meg Stuart's self-described themes of distortion, privacy, excess, and emotion.

Official Website: http://ybca.org/meg-stuart