dance piece
Harvest
Isabelle Schad & Theater o.N.
Premiere: 16 September 2021
Direction/choreography: Isabelle Schad music/live sound: Damir Simunovic Light/artistic assistance: Emma Juliard stage: Isabelle Schad Dance/Go choreography: Jan Lorys, Aya Toraiwa, Manuel Lindner Dramaturgical advice/recent audience: Dagmar Domrö's Harvest of the Willows: Volker Hüdepohl Organisational cooperation: Heiko Schramm
What does a willow stick sound like? How is he in the hand? How are the big sticks different from the small ones? The brown ones from the green ones? The old ones from the young ones? And how do they become a puppet, a whale belly or a forest, like a monster or a whip?
It's about mindfulness in Harvest; and the question of how to work with nature, how to use it and how to treat it with respect. The choreographer Isabelle Schad explores the Reisig with three dancers and a musician and creates surprising and ever-changing landscapes. Between exploring the material, layering, storing, bending the crops, twigs and branches, and listening to the crackling and crackling in silence, an imaginative play develops with seemingly weightless magical beings and other small wonders that appear – and disappear again. With poetry and lightness, the ensemble explores the relationship between man and nature – but also the sound cosmos of the willows, which produce the rhythms for the harvest and the dance.
Isabelle Schad studied classical dance in Stuttgart and danced for many choreographers until she started her own projects in 1999. Her works are located at the interface between dance, performance and visual arts and are shown at international festivals, such as ImPulsTanz Wien, Tanz im August, International Arts Festival Beijing. She has worked with the Goethe Institute several times and is a regular guest at the International Dance Platform Germany. As part of the Deutscher Tanzpreis 2019, Schad received an award for outstanding artistic developments in contemporary dance.
HARVEST is the first work of the choreographer Isabelle Schad, which was developed for a very young audience from 3 years. In 2019/2020, Isabelle Schad has already adapted her production ‘Der Bau’, based on the story by Franz Kafka, for children aged 6 and over (for the FRATZ Festival), thereby gaining initial experience with the young target group. Both works were co-produced with ‘Offensive Tanz für junges Audience Berlin’.
Nominated for the IKARUS Prize 2022
Invited to the EYE VIEW MAL! 2023
‘Farms of pasture, long as the claws of a prehistoric animal, clack on the ground. Branches scratch the wall, where they look like the ribs of a whale, leaning against it. Quietly rustle bundles of rice, which look like mythical creatures dumped into the field. Abstract yet very concrete is what the three dancers in Isabelle Schad’s ‘Harvest’ do with the reddish-brown branches of a willow tree. You can sink deep into the stream of miraculous images, which pass here and have a full-body effect, put into a trance state and at the same time sharpen your perception. […]’
‘For mindfulness, the installative dance meditation calls for: to pay attention to the natural materials and to what is happening at the moment. For children exploring their surroundings, this is a familiar attitude. They can learn how their game turns into art in ‘Harvest’.’
