Debut performance

Fitness-Center: Proletarian scenes of pressing, groaning and drops of sweat? A regrettable lack of sublime culture activities? Or a phenomenon of Post-Modernism where people put all of their creative energies into their own bodies? A place of crossing over one’s own borders? Return to a bodily consciousness that «takes a hold of the masses«? Or only a poor ersatz for a walk in the forest?

euro-scene invited the Japanese dancer and choreograph Takashi Iwaoka to create a dance performance with Leipzig’s dancers on the topic of a fitness center. Iwaoka is probably not unknown to the public. In 1999, he was at the dance solo competition in Leipzig with his solo »body in the late 20th« In spring of 2000 he and Simone Kenyon showed »exdistence« in the LOFFT. His performances and installations delved into themes of perception and the energy of performers and event on a strictly conceptional level. This analysis of this theme is not a parody and not a judgement on the meaning fitness training or lack thereof, but an artistic association with the phenomenon of physical and creative work that people apply to themselves.

»A man who wishes to be identified as an ordinary person, thinks the physicality of our own bodies is the foundation of the human existence. He extensively deals with notions of the self, alongside notions of the body, in relation to a question: ›what am I?‹ and this question leads him to another question: ›what are we?‹ He considers the awareness and understandings of what we are (if it could ever be understood) would be the key to radical changes of our perceptions of human race, which believes will benefit us as well as other species.« (Takashi Iwaoka)

»fcp« is euro-scene Leipzig’s second internal production after »Speicherung« (with the directors René Reinhardt, Stefan Kanis and Wolfgang Krause Zwieback), this time also thematically fitting the concentration of our festivals. The place of rehearsal and performance will be the LOFFT, which contributes an infrastructure and (wo)man power to this project.

Takashi Iwaoka, born in Ehime/Japan in 1976, studied fashion design and visual arts in Tokyo in 1995-97. His dance training and his choreographic qualification arises from his intensive study of Butoh dance. He studied contemporary art at Nottingham Trent University from 1997 to 2001.