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Traveling Souls
TRAVELING SOULS: An Interdisciplinary Performance
Commissioned, Curated, and Co-Produced by MOMENTUM
Created, Choreographed, and Directed by:
Emi Hariyama, Maximilian Magnus Schmidbauer, and Daniel Dodd Ellis
Interactive Light Design Specialist: Dr. Marcus Doering
Original music composed and performed by Daniel Dodd Ellis and Holm Birkholz
What happens when you bring together a Japanese ballerina from the Berlin Staatsballet, a German painter, an American opera singer, and Berlin’s most innovative interactive media artist? Magic. MOMENTUM commissioned 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 had never worked together before. Now based in Berlin, but originally from very different parts of the world, they came together to reflect on the movements that brought each of them to converge on this particular space at this particular moment. Using dance, visual art, voice and interactive light design, they responded to the unique spaces of Bethanien and the latent aura of its history. Performed in three parts in preparation for the final video, “Traveling Souls” ties together the split narratives of its migratory performers, Bethanien’s site-specific history as a place of passing, and the question that MOMENTUM continues to pose: What is time-based art?
“Traveling Souls” is scheduled to be shown in Jerusalem alongside other future locations, and MOMENTUM is excited to continue collaborating with this team of artists.
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.
For more information on Traveling Souls please click here