toula

cie. toula limnaios

better days 2003

reviews

»a winter night, without moon or stars, but light,
he sees his body, all the front, part of the front,
what makes them light, this impossible night, this impossible body,
it’s me in him remembering, remembering the true night,
dreaming of the night without morning,
and how will he manage tomorrow,
to endure tomorrow, the dawning, then the days,
the same as he managed yesterday,
to endure yesterday.
Oh, I know, it’s not me, not yet,
it’s a veteran, inured to days and nights, but he thinks of me …«
(samuel beckett: texts for nothing, 1955)

»better days« is the third part of the beckett trilogy. a man, alone in a room, with the most elementary things for living, a bed, a chair, a table – the other dancers are companions on his path, counterparts of his inner conflicts, protagonists of possible solutions, shadows of his past, phantoms of his daydreams. the audience is very close, almost as if it was itself the person sitting in this room. »better days« is a chamber piece: there´s no a big stage, but an intimate space in which five dancers move on the narrow border trail at the dividing wall, between self-distancing and inner dialogues.

»… a summer dress drifts in the fan wind towards an imaginary horizon and a new time. better days. and everyone desires them.« (www.kulturkueche.de, annett jaensch, 2003)

a cie. toula limnaios production, with the kind support of the berlin senate for science, research and culture, and the performing arts fund e.v.

concept/choreography

toula limnaios

music

ralf r. ollertz

dance/creation

lea helmstädter, ulrich huhn, lena meierkord, aneta szydlak, krzysztof zawadzki

musician

elwira niewiera (stimme)

lightdesign

toula limnaios, ralf r. ollertz

public relation

silke wiethe

space/costumes

toula limnaios, ralf r. ollertz

videoprojections

cyan

fotos

dieter hartwig

reviews

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»a dance with oneself /// the cie. toula limnaios presents modern dance as a chamber piece. the heels hit the floor defiantly, over and over again. a dancer crosses the room, stumbles, then gets pulled back to the starting point by rubber cords. this female sisyphus on high heels fights against the agony of repetition. in ›better days‹, the last part of a beckett trilogy, the performers enter into an idiosyncratic dance with oneself. there is a man in the center. the stage is an intimate room with a table and a chair. the other dancers are his companions in this tableau in the style of a chamber piece, reflections of his thoughts, and at the same time also the time chimeras from a dream world, and concrete beings of the here and now. the confessions of a multiple personality are portrayed in the dance, in the literary presentation created as manic monologic reflections, always on the edge between self-abandonment and rebellion.

the performers draw surprising images of inwardness from their dance vocabulary. sometimes the everyday gesture becomes the tour de force of an individual, sometimes a silent-moving dialogue carries the piece. limnaios – a resident of berlin, has earned the reputation of a poet among choreographers, with her creations.
at the end, when the haunted pose of the search for meaning dissolves into a cheerful look into the future. to let a delicate feather float is what the power of the hermit’s soul aims for. a summer dress drifts in the fan wind towards an imaginary horizon and a new time. better days. and everyone desires them.« (www.kulturkueche.de, annett jaensch, 2003)