Maria Hassabi
CANCELLED
October 22, 2022–October 23, 2022HELLERAU Festival Theatre, Dresden
Maria Hassabi’s CANCELLED, a performative work for four female performers, moves within a soundscape that emphasizes an endless lifespan. The choreography utilizes Hassabi’s signature style of stillness and deceleration, and displays representational female poses based on mannerisms throughout history. The use of verticality and frontality create a form of resistance both as a metaphor and as a reality, reflecting on ideas that are directly related to the work’s title. CANCELLED being meticulously crafted, evokes and questions the subtle interchanges of power between subjects.
Since the early 2000s Hassabi has carveda unique artistic practice based on the relationship between the live body, the still image, and the sculptural object. Hassabi’s works reflect on concepts of time and the human figure, while employing a variety of media to emphasize the complexity of formal organization. In most of Hassabi’s works the performing body is the main subject, often embedded within imposing installations. Through meticulously crafting her material -every action, even the gaze, is subject to counts and cues –a constant negotiation between the body’s relation to gravity, time and space, reveals the physical side effects of labor, anchoring both dancers’ and viewers’ awareness to the present moment. The initial invitation of a spectacle exhausts itself,and a common corporeality and radical intimacy is exposed.
Saturday 22 October 2022 at 18:00 and 21:00
Sunday 23 October 2022 at 13:00 and 16:00
