Riki von Falken (Germany)
21 August 2010 - 17 October 2010
This residency was cut short due to the September 4 earthquake. The Body Festival was cancelled due to the earthquake.
Riki von Falken (Germany) (in partnership with the Body Festival)
Whilst in residence, Riki will be working with members of the Southern Lights Dance Company in a studio at the Arts Centre. Her work with the company will be performed on October 4 at the James Hay Theatre, Christchurch along with two other dance works by New Zealand choreographers Fleur de Thier and Maria Dabrowska. She will also give artist talks and masterclasses to high school dance students as part of her residency here.
Biography
Born in Hohenlimburg, Germany in 1954, Riki von Falken a foundation in ballet, but has also trained in jazz, modern, step dance, contract improvisation, Alexander Technique and Feldenkrais method. The influential Merce Cunningham was among the dancers she trained with in the past. From 1981 to 1987 she worked as a professional dancer in Germany as well as a choreographer. She has performed as a guest dancer around Germany and the rest of world in Italy, Hungary, The Czech Republic, Canada and The USA. Since 2006 she has held a freelance dance lectureship at Weber School in Düsseldorf in dance pedagogy and since 2007 has held a lectureship in dance at the Hochschule für Schauspielkunst.
Artist statement
After seven years of dancing in a company, I discovered solo dancing, now my artistic form since 1989. My early solo pieces were influenced by an interest in the visual arts and architecture. The last pieces “White Linen” (2000), “Wach” (2001) and “one more than one” (2003) are of radical introspection. They process personal experiences and the confrontation of life and death.
In “Eine Begegung zwischen Ungleichen” (2005), a meeting between me, a disabled actor and a second dancer, I have chosen for myself a new artistic path trough the use of dance, film and the special quality of the stage space. I tried to focus the gaze on what happens when different forms of movement clash. The relationships and tension developed through the distinct movement approaches of each performer.
In the new dance piece “The Geometry of Separation” (2009), I explore the problematic of exclusion – a fear that lies at the very heart of contemporary life. In collaboration with the film maker Mareike Engelhardt I created a fictional dialogue between dance and video, in which the dancer on stage and the dancer within the film encounter each other as their Alter Ego. Confronted with an outside world that is uninhabitable, I developed a language of movement, both abstract and ironical, in an effort to integrate into these unreal and psychological spaces.
