SPHEARES
2024 | film, installation
In a world dominated by the violence of the immediate image, the importance of verbal statements and opinions, or that which is semantically or physically tangible and thus manifests what we perceive as reality, hören (en: ‘hearing’; following Jean-Luc Nancy) can be seen as a transformative space that shifts the boundaries of the familiar and the known. In contrast to the relational, purposeful listening ('zu-hören') focussed on acoustically perceptible vibrations, SPHEARES opens up a speculative time-space that understands materially acoustically and visually perceptible vibrations as access points to alternative, invisible, untouchable, inarticulable, inaudible realities lingering in between.
Sound recordings of a dancer are at the core of SPHEARES. The body moves between and through the audience via six loudspeakers distributed around the room. The slow, almost immobile images projected onto gauze show a transparent, collapsed, void world that appears to be unrelated to the acoustic dance. Along a further sonic level of artificial spatial sounds, the audience is transported through seemingly incoherent, hypothetical time-spaces, which in turn invite the audience to drift and doze off. Always counterpointed by the constantly dancing body, the gazes of the audience seated opposite occasionally meet when the gauze blanks out or when their own focus is lost.
concept, director, filming & composition: Johannes Schropp
dance: Raquel Nevado Ramos
trumpet: Ines Hartmuth
assistant concept, dramaturgy: Leander Ruprecht
dramaturgical advisor: Ching-Wen Peng
a cooperation by Johannes Schropp with art.ist wiesbaden, the MA Choreographie & Performance in the frame of the Hessian Theatre Academy (HTA). supported by Dance Nexus. with financial support by Kulturamt Wiesbaden and a residency by Tanzplattform Rhein-Main.
photos of the recording process:
(all photos by tatsuki takada)