December 2023
The interdisciplinary evening Terrestrial Transit asks how we can embrace the earthly and finite transition of being as a way of life. With five performances at DOCK11 until December 9, 2023, the company Cranky Bodies concludes a nomadic project that began in Berlin and led via Brandenburg and the border town of Szczecin to the Baltic Sea.
It is an old topos that we as humans are only guests on earth. In conservative Christian narratives, which to this day continues to have at times (unfortunately) more or less explicit influence on human perspectives and policies, paradise beckons at the end of the earthly journey: a heaven of the redeemed, a place of ethereal beings who have overcome gravity. While the Mars and moon ambitions of an Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos perpetuate this utopian escapism, others recognise that it is time to free the transit spot Earth from its bus stop status.
This requires time, mutual care, responsibility and the courage to dare to make experiments that can lead to great things, or to fail. We experience this on several levels during the three-hour improvised performance. Firstly, there is the framework of a video work that stretches across two sides of the stage. It brings images of a journey into the space: an attic studio in Ponderosa in Brandenburg, a windy seashore, an unused road, a wood behind the industrial ruins of Szczecin. It shows people who are not here today, as well as earlier versions of the eleven performers who now refer to the projected images here with subtle gestures and actions. The third space that opens up speaks of the passing of time and the incalculable magic of memory, in which fortune and loss are inextricably intertwined.
(Johanna Ackwa at www.tanzschreiber.de)
Artistic direction: Peter Pleyer, Michiel Keuper
Production management: Paul Trzeciok
Production assistance: Agnė Auželytė
Costume, stage design: Michiel Keuper
Costume assistance: Juliane Längin
Costume intern: Miłosz Jon
Film: Stella Horta
Sound/Music: Marc Lohr
Light: Joanna Leśnierowska
Dance: Alexandra Borys, Anna Nowicka (film), Alistair Watts (film), Asaf Aharonson, Bjørn Ivan Ekemark/Ivanka Tramp, Caroline Neill Alexander, Eszter Gál, Ka Rustler (film), Márcio Kerber Canabarro, Marysia Stokłosa, Mor Demer, Oliver Connew, Peter Pleyer
Guests: (Szczecin) Bartek Mikuła, Katarzyna Sitarz
Dramaturgy/Outside Eye: Jette Büchsenschütz, Kirsten Maar
A production by Cranky Bodies a/company in coproduction with DOCKART. Funded by Berliner Senat für Kultur und Gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhalt, Hauptstadtkulturfonds with the support of SOPHIENSÆLE and Muzeum Susch and by Fonds Darstellende Künste with funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media within the program NEUSTART KULTUR.
Many thanks to Ponderosa, Teatr Kana (Szczecin) and TRAFO Center for Contemporary Art (Szczecin).