Close to you (and think of the song)
Time seems to bend at a railway station: While a group of people wait, for a train or perhaps something else, their distinctive lives and stories start to merge and refract. With fascinating attention to detail, as if the choreography were zooming closer to and stretching the time experienced by them, their internal states, memories, hopes and fears are exposed. The contrast between these intimate worlds and the quotidian public setting creates a surreal counterpoint; normally this is a place in which emotions are restrained and hidden, but here ‘the station’ becomes a landscape of expression in unusual and particular ways. Paradoxically this makes us question the nature of this supposed venue of inexpressibility and makes us re-look at our own lives and those around us: how connected we are to others in everyday life even if we aren’t aware of it? Then an outsider arrives to call into question this separation between reality and representation. It is an evening that plays with temporalities, with the alternating between the internal and external and oscillates between surreal comedy and intense tragedy.
concept and choreography: Yi-Chun Liu
assistant choreographer: Niv Melamed
music: Raphaëlle Latini
stage and costume design: Sabina Moncys
dramaturgy: Caroline Rohmer
production: Stadttheater Giessen
WITH
Gustavo de Oliveira Leite, Emma Jane Howley, Pin-Chen Hsu, Borys Jaźnicki, Rose Marie Lindstrøm, Maja Mirek, Jeff Pham, Magdalena Stoyanova, Omar Torrico Real
premiere: 04.05.2024, Giessen (DE)
pictures by Lena Bills