Where do free experimental music and dance scenes in Cologne intertwine and who collaborates with whom and on which topics? In February Anna Neubert, violinist of Ensemble uBu and concert director, talks with Carla Jordão and Timm Roller of SPECIES Group, Silvia Ehnis and Vincent Michalke of TachoTinta and Elsa Artmann and Annie Bloch of ArtmannDuvoisin.
Elsa Artmann and Samuel Duvoisin have been working on performative and installative formats as Artmann & Duvoisin in the theatre and art context since 2015. The themes of their work are formats and concepts of social coexistence such as the family, housing and work. They explore questions of collective composition and shared authorship as well as the political content of dance activity.
For »A Voice of A Generation« they collaborated with musician Annie Bloch and explore in voice and movement intersections of their dance activity with neoliberal concepts of self and labour and speculate how their artistic language can change when ideas of enhancement, renewal, singularity and overcoming one’s own limits are solemnly adopted.
The choreographic trio TachoTinta consists of the dance artists Silvia Ehnis Perez Duarte, Mijin Kim and Seulki Hwang (Mexico and South Korea). »We live and work on the Rhine and Ruhr as experts in cultural misunderstandings. We approach questions of physicality and storytelling from a transcultural perspective and are inspired by the hurdles and misunderstandings along the way. In a playful, lively and accessible tone, we invite audiences to participate, awaken their senses, raise their awareness and trust that sharing enriches lives.«
TachoTinta collaborates with composer Vincent Michalke. In »Cultural Drag« they walk the path of drag, glamorous exaggeration, together with the audience. Personal experiences with racism and exclusion keep pushing them to think about culture, identity and transculturality. Stereotyping oneself becomes a subversive strategy to play with expectations, attributions and perceptions.
As violinist, master of disaster of ensemble uBu or accomplice of other artists, Anna Neubert plays, directs and infiltrates concert settings, so far to be experienced at the Schwetzinger Festspiele, AchtBrücken Festival, Bundeskunsthalle and Beethovenhaus Bonn, Villa Massimo Rome, also in various culture bunkers and day-care centers. She has directed numerous concert projects, most recently for the INTERVALL series of the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen.
Since 2020, she has been researching the interfaces between music and weaving art as part of the »Weaving Concerts« with textile artist Nicole Kiersz. Furthermore, she can be experienced as a violinist and performer in concerts of electronicID, in productions of the Junge Oper am Rhein, in duo with guitarist Leonhard Spies and together with soprano Marie Heeschen in a staged version of G. Kurtág’s Kafka Fragments. Anna Neubert studied violin and contemporary music in Cologne and Paris.