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MEHMET MEMO SANDER

(USA)

Single Space & The Fuck

Mehmet Sander, an artist born in Turkey who moved to America in order to be able to make work that freely expressed his homosexuality, is now, ironically, gaining acceptance in his homeland because of artistic success in the West. 

These two solos, first presented in Europe as part of the New Moves Festival in Glasgow last year, focus on movement as an action of the moment. Instead of concealing choreography within set, costumes and music, Sander punches home the muscular geometry of his body in relation to the floor and walls. 

In what he calls "collaboration with gravity", he pummels out a series of gymnastic routines, amplifying the noise of his flesh hitting ground by miking up his mat. Asking the audience to respond immediately and without intellectual analysis, he presents the male body as all the more vulnerable despite its strength. 

One piece that does use taped sound however is "The Fuck", a taped conversation, or rather a monologue, of an American policeman who we assume to be raping another man. In "Single Space", Sander's dynamic movement is constrained within a square frame, hanging from its high beam, and falling horizontally from top to bottom. Meticulously structured, danger and risk develop in the relatively few minutes of intensity. 

"His pulverising workouts cannily embrace much that is punitive and discriminatory and emblematic about authority structures - the rigorous physical tasks routinely doled out to trainee marines to "make men of them". His body gloriously tuned and exercised, challenges such things even as if challenges gravity". (Mory Brennan, Dance Theatre Journal)

Danse
Belluard Bollwerk
  • Tue 5.7. 21:00 - 22:00
Credits

Chorégraphie/danse: Mehmet Memo Sonder

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