SCHWANEN(2022)
Durational performance and installation: with sound, objects activated by performers, perspex.
In 'Schwanen', a durational dance piece by Lene Vollhardt for four performers, the symbolic grammar of Fokine’s classical ballet piece (Le Cygne) “Dying Swan” is appropriated with the aid of prosthetic tools constructed particularly for the well-known, iconic movement representing a swan wrestling with death.
Vollhardt's choreography proposes a reconstruction of several layers of meaning of the animal in language, folklore and mythology.
The title refers to the archaic german word "Schwanen" (literally "swaning" or "being a swan"). According to fairytale author Grimm, it as an inherited word of the common people, connecting it to the traditional Germanic association of swans with prophecy and fate. On one hand, 'Schwanen' explores what mythology dissimulates as it relays, remixes, re-versions mnemotechnical remnants through movement and the rich language of somatic registers. Simultaneously, the tools' function prompts performers to engage with stretching and gliding of the body, perhaps as if asking, how much stretching a body can endure. They make a historical note of the feminized body as both indentured servant and aesthetic labourer. The prosthetic tool's stretching function somatically problematizes the way in which the performance of authority or power stands in a dichotomous relationship to support structures, potentially opening up channels between the two.
While 'Schwanen' takes the form of both a solo and collective choreography in various chapters, in both versions memories of dichotomous forces of kinship and rivalry, of endurance and constraint, are embodied through intimate dances.
Full documentation on request.
Schwanen (Solo Poison Path)
Choreography, Installation Lene Vollhardt
Performer Atabey Carlos Maria Romero (above) Chris Owen, Dabin Kim, Jem Bentham, Dr. NO, Lene Vollhardt
At Royal Academy of Arts London 2022
Schwanen (Bevy Poison Path) – choreography, installation Lene Vollhardt performers Atabey Carlos Maria Romero, Chris Owen, Dabin Kim, Jem Bentham, Dr. NO, At Royal Academy of Arts London 2022
Schwanen (Bevy Poison Path), 2022
Perspex mirrors, prosthetic tools (latex, aluminium casts, various textiles, recycled leather), Jesmonite casts
Installation view: Royal Academy of Art, London
Niebelungen of Mayfair (2022) as part of the installation "Schwanen", 5 min HD video, sound, Performed by Charlie Kafflyn, Written and filmed by Lene Vollhardt
more of 'Schwanen' installation here
The Sphere x 2033 (2022)
LARP (Live Action Role Play) for the Sphere presented by ConTempo, LITHUANIA (2022)
After the datafication of flesh
(❛‿❛✿)
During two weeks of Contempo Kaunas, Lithuanhia, Lene Vollhardt larped the collective creation of a 'Sphere' - the wider environment governed by a DAO (distributed autonomous organization) of a near future, in which she became the curator of relational conditions, and involved 13 local residents.
The newly formed fugitive assembly gathering around two female members called "scar of finance" and "the digital soul", collected and edited mnemotechnical remnants of relational ecologies, which formed the basis of a 3-days long performance. Its purpose was to explore dystopian dangers that had made the various protagonists who they were today, against which the residents need to form collective resistance through the mutual creation of a DAO (decentralized autonomous organizations), which would enable the condition of, in the words of Rhea Meyers, "a thousand DAOs to bloom".
Artist Lene Vollhardt
Co-Dramaturg Erik Bordeleau
VR Design Timur Novikov
Scenography & Scent laura fernández antolín
Sound Scenography HASHIA
Performers Inga Galinytė, Violina Romeikaitė, Marija Baranauskaite, Eglė Ukanytė, Lilly Jankauskaite, Monika Poderytė, Džiugas Kunsmanas, Marius Jurgutis, laura fernández antolín, Jonas Tertelis, Markas Liberman, Arturas Sedys, Nida Žickytė, Ana-Maria Deliu, Anika Wiese, Ataberk Casur
CEMENT X (2018)
"Cement x" is a trans-futuristic dystopian desire. A romance amidst a time of algorithmic governance. It is ideological hope and lavish embrace of complicity with the disavowed craving for soft oppression. It is a temporal reservoir that we see currently (2018) expressed in a secret alliance between self-proclaimed neo-marxists, identitarian alternatives and the bourgeois center-left, articulated through the apparently minimal graphic deferral from "hipster" to "nipster." Their neoliberal complicity, covered as as allegedly in itself resistant mode of existence, cooperates in a single pragmatic technique of denial: self-care.