Traveling Souls | Momentum

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TRAVELING SOULS

09 DECEMBER: LIVE PERFORMANCE
14-23 DECEMBER: GALLERY EXHIBITION

TRAVELING SOULS: An Interdisciplinary Performance
Commissioned, Curated, and Co-Produced by MOMENTUM: Rachel Rits-Volloch and Cassandra Bird
Created, Choreographed, and Directed by Emi Hariyama,Maximilian Magnus Schmidbauer, and Daniel Dodd Ellis
and Interactive Light Design Specialist Dr. Marcus Doering
Original music composed and performed by:
Daniel Dodd Ellis
Holm Birkholz
Followed by an afterparty at 3 Schwestern
In the Kunstquartier Bethanien
With Sarsaparilla Band performing LIVE

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What happens when you bring together a Japanese ballerina dancing with the Berlin Staatsballet, a German painter, an American opera singer, and Berlin’s most innovative interactive media artist? Magic. MOMENTUM commissions a new work made specially for our gallery in the historic Kunstquartier Bethanien, a former hospital built in 1847 by Kaiser Friedrich Wilhelm IV which functioned as a hospital until 1970. Subsequently inhabited and fought over by squatters and arts organizations, this space has had a poignant and colorful history.

Enter four diverse artists who have never worked together before. Now based in Berlin, but originally from very different parts of the world, they come together to reflect on the movements which have brought each of them to converge on this particular space at this moment. Using dance, visual art, voice, and interactive light design, they respond to the unique spaces of Bethanien and the latent aura of its history. In asking these artists to work together, we have given them free reign to develop their own expressions towards this location and their own answers to the question MOMENTUM continuously poses: What is time-based art?

Crossing interdisciplinary boundaries, drawn together through creative synergies, this foursome of talent embodies MOMENTUM’S mission to enable great art to happen across cultural and institutional borders. What happens when you bring together a ballet dancer, a painter, an opera singer, and a media artist? We expect to be amazed by the answer.

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Emi Hariyama has graduated from the Bolshoi Ballet School in Moscow with top scores, and won numerous international competitions and awards. She has performed at the ballet theatres in Moscow, Essen, San Jose, Boston, and Leningrad, amongst others, and is currently with the Staatsballett Berlin. The Japanese-born ballerina, together with her family, furthermore organises the biannual “Dream Concert“ held in cities throughout Japan. Emi Hariyama is the director of EIA, specializing in Performance and Event Production, Arts management, and Arts Business Consulting. She works with artists, filmmakers, and musicians, maintaining an exciting interdisciplinary practice alongside her expertise in traditional ballet.

The spectrum of Daniel Dodd-Ellis as a stage performer ranges from opera, classic drama, experimental theater, and interdisciplinary performance. His studies of Theater and Vocal Performance at Sarofim School of Fine Arts in Texas/USA and at the New York City Opera have decisively shaped his understanding of improvised movement, vocal play and spatial awareness. Under the direction of Robert Wilson he performed the title role in the touring blues/gospel opera “The Temptation of St. Anthony“. Furthermore, Daniel is a lyricist and playwrite, composes poetry and successfully performs with his soul/funk band “Daniel Dodd-Ellis & Band“. In Germany, he has collaborated with Marius Müller-Westernhagen, Daniel Hall and Patrick Nuo, amongst others, and co-created two performances in galleries in Hamburg and Berlin titled “Love and War“ and “The Mantis“.

Maximilian Magnus Schmidbauer is a trained set painter and has been for six consecutive years a stipendiary participant and teacher in Robert Wilson´s Watermill Center NY. He has worked as assistant to Lisa de Kooning and has had, as the first artist after Willem de Kooning´s death, the possibility to work and exhibit in his studio in the Hamptons. He has acted as a Visual Designer for Rufus Wainwright, Norah Jones and Jessye Norman, and since 2007 he manages the Academy of Scenic Painting and Arts in Unteregg/Bavaria together with his father Werner Schmidbauer. Maximilian lives in New York, Munich and Berlin. His works as an artist have been shown in numerous exhibitions in Germany, the United States, Russia and Spain, and are currently developing towards the three-dimensional and motion, towards dance performance, theater and music.

Marcus Doering holds a PhD in Physics and has made a name for himself with pmd-art for innovative light design. Together with André Bernhardt and the designers of büro+staubach, he realizes interactive worlds of experience for the brand communication of industrial enterprises as well as space and body projections for opera and theater, TV shows, fairs, corporate functions and huge public events. The three-dimensional illuminations and real-time projections on actors and objects that are moving through space correspond exactly to their contours, calculated by a specially developed 3D computer model. In Berlin, Marcus participated with interactive LED zones during the “Festival of Lights“ 2011, and currently his light art can be seen in the “Magical Mystery Show“ at the Wintergarten Variété.

REHEARSAL SHOTS ROUND 1