The Prima Ballerina, the DJ, and the Painter
On the Genesis of an Unusual Project
Who are the young people who stream week after week into Berlin’s Berghain, Europe's most celebrated club, surrendering for three full days to the rush of the beat and the sound? What motivates them when it's not time to party? How does a generation live that grew up with Facebook and other Internet platforms, a generation whose style of personal communication has been fundamentally transformed by online infrastructures? Now, the Berlin Staatsballett (State Ballet), DJs from Berghain, and the well-known German painter Norbert Bisky have joined forces to examine this question via a dance-music-art project. The title Träge Masse (Inert Mass) is ironic, but is also a realistic reflection on a generation which allows itself to drift. It is a question of the artistic presentation of the Facebook generation, of a new movement. For us, music is a medium of communication, and the beat belongs to this generation as much as Apple and the IPhone. The DJs strive to generate a sound which stands for a state of mind, the choreographers and dancers of the Berlin Staatsballett search for movements that fit the sounds, moves symptomatic of a generation, and Norbert Bisky constructs the space.
Concretely: three choreographers are working with three groups of ballet dancers from the Staatsballett and two musicians/DJs on a piece for which Norbert Bisky is creating images and installations in collaboration with the ballet company’s costume and lighting departments. This is a crossover production. Each participant learns from the others, learns to collaborate with other disciplines while probing his or her personal and artistic limits. It is a question of compromise and of collaboration. “We're not just sitting alone in our separate little rooms and seeing what happens... From the beginning, we've all been meeting again and again in various constellations and rehearsing together,” explains Christiane Theobald, Acting Director of the Berlin Staatsballett, who is supervising the production on behalf of the Staatsballett.
As a project, “Träge Masse” is a work-in-progress. It develops and grows continually as, again and again, ideas are tossed out and ultimately rejected. In the end, three different artistic forms are being grafted onto one another in order to present a project that will feature a top-flight cast of the kind rarely heard or seen publicly.
