Cavaliers impurs

In Arabic, German, English and French.

Antonia Baehr is a choreographer, performer & video maker. Next to choreographic elements, Antonia Baehr is interested in rules and the laws which a society (and in particular the space in a theatre) assigns to bodies, to make them recognizable and comprehensible. She is a performer, a filmmaker and a visual artist, and as a choreographer she researches the fiction of everyday-life performance and the fiction of theatre, working at the edges of that which defines us as human beings—placing us via a voluptuous see-saw in critical positions. She is interested in the relations between humans and animals but also in elements in representational space. In her work she interacts with, among others, Neo Hülcker, Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, Andrea Neumann, Latifa Laâbissi, and with others who are interested in the changing of roles: from project to project, each artist is alternately the host or the guest. Lately she has been developping collaborative duets. Baehr is also the producer for the horse whisperer and dancer Werner Hirsch, the musician and choreographer Henri Fleur, the ex-husband of Ida Wilde and composer/performer Henry Wilde.

Latifa Laâbissi is a choreographer and performer. Mixing genres and redefining formats, the creations of Latifa Laa bissi bring onstage multiple off-stage / off-field elements channeling different figures and voices. The staging of these voices and the face as a vehicle of minority states ties into the danced portions of the work in Self portrait camouflage (2006) and Loredreamsong (2010). Continuing her thematic study of archives, she created Écran somnambule and La part du rite (2012) based on German dance from the 1920’s. Pourvu qu’on ait l’ivresse (2016), co-signed with the set designer Nadia Lauro, created visions, landscapes and images, combining excess, monstrosity, the beautiful, the random, the comic and fear. Since 2011, Latifa Laa bissi has been Artistic Director of the Extension Sauvage artistic and pedagogical program and festival in rural Brittany. In 2016, a monograph on the ensemble of her work was published by the Editions Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers and Les presses du réel. In 2018, she created with Antonia Baehr the performance Consul et Meshie. She also gathered in 2019 for the video Moving Backwards by Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, presented in the Swiss Pavillon of the 58th Venice Biennale. The same year, her cre- ation White Dog was shown at european festivals (Marseille, Tanz im August – Berlin, Automne à Paris, festival TNB Rennes), before a french and international tour. In 2021, the creation Ghost Party (part I) is a duet-performance with the Dutch videomaker Manon de Boer, which will form a pair with a film by Autumn, Ghost Party (part II). Both parts will be exhibited in FRAC Bretagne. At the same time, Latifa Laa bissi prepares a new piece with the brasilian choreographer Marcelo Evelin. This almost all-night party, entitled La Nuit tombe quand elle veut will be created by Fall 2021 at the Festival TNB in Rennes. In 2022, Fugitive Archives a group piece will be created for the CCN Ballet de Lorraine.

Nadia Lauro is a scenographer. As a visual artist and set designer, Nadia Lauro has been developing her work for several decades in various contexts (scenic spaces, landscape architectures, museums). She has conceived set designs, environments, and visual installations with strong dramaturgical power, thus generating new ways of seeing and being together. Nadia Lauro has collaborated with thefollowing international choreographers and perfor- mers: Vera Mantero, Benoi t Lachambre, Emmanuelle Huynh, Fanny de Chaillé, Alain Buffard, Antonija Livingstone, Latifa Laâbissi, Jonathan Capdevielle, Laeticia Dosh and with Jennifer Lacey with whom she co-authored numerous pro- jects. Les Presses du Réel published Jennifer Lacey & Nadia lauro-dispositifs chorégraphiques by Alexandra Baudelot. She recieved a New York Dance and Performance Award (The Bessie) for her visual installation in $Shot (Lacey/Lauro/ Parkins/Cornell). In 1998 she founded Squash Cake Bureau with the architect Laurence Cremel to develop landscape design and urban furniture projects. She also designed concerts (Cocorosie, Gaspard Yurkévitch, Dani Siciliano). She has developed scripted environments in museums, theater houses, and art galleries in Europe, Japan, and Korea. For the 4th edition of the New Festival at the Centre Pompidou, she has presented La Clairière (Fanny de Chaillé/Nadia Lauro), an immersive visual environment designed to hear “Khhhhhhh”, Imaginary and Invented Languages. Since 2014, Nadia Lauro is associate artist to the Extension Sauvage Festival (Latifa Laabissi / Figure Project).

The duo „Cavaliers impurs“ (Troubled Riders) is a cabaret, a collage of genre-bending acts that takes place in a giant opened-out cardboard box. The piece celebrates the art of dance, the cover version, the drag show and features the menopausal dance, and performance art gone adrift. From number to number, the two performers channel a multitude of venerable personalities who come to populate the stage.

After Consul and Meshie, a completely unclassifiable performance piece that played with the audience’s gaze, Latifa Laâbissi and Antonia Baehr have created a new duo together. Cavaliers impurs (Troubled Riders) is a series of eclectic sequences, strung together with a through-line that is impure; hybrid; a collage. Two bodies of different shapes and sizes, two distillations of images and references, are put through the mill of their physical and vocal intensity. Mixing their respective vocabularies—their relationship to facial expression, to drag and register, they weave together their two universes through sequences that explode our choreographic codes and blur boundaries.
Part fairy-tale house, part design object; an ephemeral architecture: scenographer Nadia Lauro’s giant cardboard box serves simultaneously as shelter, building blocks, platform or podium on top of which they assemble and disassemble the figures they summon to the space. Witnesses to a fragmented culture, their bodies examine the detritus, rearrange postures, sample symbols, sing sabotaged hymns and distort statements. They are riders on a joyous apocalypse, setting off at full speed on their immaterial mounts, turning performance upside down and letting themselves be inhabited by a multitude of venerable, revered and vulnerable characters, alternately becoming belly dancers, minimalist clubbers, cabaret hosts, a comedy duo like Laurel and Hardy, a punk band without guitars, cowboy tamers – topographers of the body and anatomists of the impure…

– Gilles Amalvi (translated by Dan Belasco-Rogers).

Concept and Performance: Antonia Baehr & Latifa Laâbissi
 / Music and Sound Design: Carola Caggiano / Concept and Realization Visual Installation: Nadia Lauro
/ Realization Visual Installation: Marie Maresca, Charlotte Wallet /
Light Design: Eduardo Abdala / Vocal Coach: Dalila Khatir
/ Figures: Antonia Baehr, Latifa Laâbissi, Nadia Lauro / Internship: Esteban Capron, Suet Wa Tam, Johan Boyer
/ Production: Alexandra Wellensiek (make up productions), Fanny Virelizier & Marie Cherfils 
(Figure Project) / Coproduction: HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin (DE) / Le TNB – Centre européen théâtral et
 chorégraphique, Rennes (FR) / National choreographic center of Caen in Normandy, within 
the framework of “Accueil-studio” / Ministry of Culture and Communication (FR) / Festival
 d’Automne, Paris (FR) / Fonds Transfabrik, a German-French Fund for Performing
Arts (DE/FR).

Funded by Hauptstadtkulturfonds Berlin and the Senate Department for Culture and
 Community, Berlin and the French Ministry of Culture, DRAC Brittany. With the support of la Ménagerie de Verre, Paris, dans le cadre du Studiolab &
 Theaterhaus Berlin

After:

“The World of Gilbert and George”, Film produced by Philip Haas, Directed by and starring Gilbert & George, Script by Gilbert & George (1980)
“Dancefloor”, Song by Brigitte Fontaine feat. Grace Jones (2011)
“I Love My Little Rooster”, American Folk Song, sung by Almeda Riddle (1960)
“Kavaliere”, Song by “Die Tödliche Doris”, Lyrics by Wolfgang Müller, Composition by Nikolaus Utermöhlen & Wolfgang Müller (1982)
“Einstein on the Beach: Knee Play 1”, Opera in Four Acts by Philip Glass, Libretto by Robert Wilson & Philip Glass (1976)
“Two Men Dancing”, Photography by Robert Mapplethorpe (1984/1990)

Additional Music:
“Hob Eih”, by Oum Kalthoum
“Mourir sur scène”, by Dalida
“Trakatá”, by Ptazeta, Farina