Work-in-Progress – STAGE 2
photos: Zee Hartmann
CREATION & PERFORMANCE Joni Barnard, Liselotte Singer & Marc Philipp Gabriel
COSTUMES Tizo All & Team
VIDEO ADVICE & DOCUMENTATION Elisa Purfürst
NOV 2021 / Uferstudios Berlin / Residency Programme
In the frame of the Berlin Residency “TRIALS AND REVISITING”, Joni Barnard continued working on their collaborative performance Danse Macabre and the Burning of the Bugs. The project is a tragic-comic response to the current species extinction in the insect world, the horror of the Bug Apocalypse and the absurdity of humankind’s violent destruction of our habitat. Joni invited the videographer Elisa Purfürst, the dancer-performer Liselotte Singer, Marc Philipp Gabriel as a visiting performer and dramaturg and Tizo All for costume and scenic design and conception. For the residency the artists concentrated on creating soundscapes and layering realtime making and projected images to the performance. As further input, they consulted experts on insects based in and around Berlin and researched deeply the team’s experience, bias and discrimination towards interspecies interconnectedness.
Work-in-Progress – STAGE 1
Joni & Marc met 5 years ago in South Africa. Since then the biomass of flying insects has declined by about 14%, as studies in Germany and Puerto Rico have shown. When Joni & Marc were kids, there where 4 times more flying insects than now. Since then the amount of beatles, flies, bees and butterflies has reduced by 75% – in just 30 years! Danse Macabre and the burning of the bugs is a response to the current horror of the Bug Apocalypse, the violence we inflict on the planet and each other and the absurdity of our self-induced overheated end of days. How many bugs have died today?
CONCEPT / CREATION / PERFORMANCE Joni Barnard & Marc Philipp Gabriel
13 MAR 2021 / AS AN ACT OF LOVE – Chapter 2: Climate Change // PremArts / Berlin
& live stream