Schützen

Cecilie Ullerup Schmidt (DE/DK) / Matthias Meppelink (DE)

PERFORMANCE-TRILOGIE ZUM KÖRPER AN DER WAFFE

What is a nation? Its borders, its territory, its population, their culture, customs, and rituals. All that should be protected, identity should be preserved, if necessary with force. But how? And at what cost?

Every morning before work, drone pilots meet in the American Nevada Control Station for yoga. And in the evening, before becoming private persons again, another half hour of collective meditation helps bring them back into their everyday lives. Strategies to protect against burnout in the bodies absent from modern warfare.

In “Ready, Aim,” the first part of her long-term study “Schützen,” the young Danish choreographer and performer Cecilie Ullerup Schmidt examines athletic and strategic aspects of the physical preparation for weapon usage and war. The second part of the trilogy, “Fire,” takes the act of shooting itself by the horns, the delegating of killing: is institutionalized killing a private activity or a social one? Finally, “Release” is based on interviews with former soldiers from the Israeli army: phantom reminders of living with a weapon as a prosthesis.
Cecilie Ullerup Schmidt plays with the double meaning of the word Schützen (shooters/protect), talking about people who shoot, and also about the movements of shielding, securing, and deterring. She adopts the movements, with their masculine connotations, in a friendly, assertive way, looking into the culturally different ways how handling weapons effects the human body.

ON

THURSDAY 27 JUNE 07:30 PM Cologne
Language DE & EN Freies Werkstatt Theater
FRIDAY 28 JUNE 07:30 PM Cologne
Language DE & EN Freies Werkstatt Theater
SATURDAY 29 JUNE 05:30 PM Cologne
Language DE & EN Freies Werkstatt Theater

Duration 90 Min

TICKETS

Choreography, performance: Cecilie Ullerup Schmidt
Music and lighting: Matthias Meppelink
With: Dorit Tzoref-Ashkenazi, Ania Nowak and others
Artistic collaboration: Milena Kipfmüller
Illustrator: Marie-Louise Andersson

A coproduction of Tanztage Berlin, Sophiensaele Berlin and Berliner Festspiele / Foreign Affairs.
Funded by The Danish Arts Foundation and the Governing Mayor of Berlin – Senate Chancellery – Cultural Affairs.

This event is made possible by the NATIONAL PERFORMANCE NETWORK as part of their program supporting guest performances, funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media as well as the State Ministries for Arts and Culture.

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