Isabelle Schad: A double bill of doubling humanity

When you have the rare pleasure to see the same set of shows twice in a row, you will be stunned by the range and variety of impressions a single stage production can provoke one night after another, with the choreography, scenography or sound design being hardly touched.

The double bill in question consists of “Bodies of Light” and “Close by, So far – Landscapes of Infinity”, both creations by Berlin-based choreographer Isabelle Schad.
A study of the human form, arranged as a double-portrait “Bodies of Light” has the performers Yen Lee and Claudia Tomasi casually step on an arrangement of black tatamis, splitting the stage into two distinct islands and anchored by a large dark curtain attached to the theatre’s back wall. Both scenography and costume design, marked by Schad’s signature sobriety, have black as their dominant colour. Nothing, so it seems, should interfere with the stage action where details, texture, light levels and rhythm play a prominent role.

Once on the mats, the two performers engage in a rapid sequence of arm and shoulder movements, repeated through the lateral swing of their torsos. By holding their elbows with their hands, the performers create a V-shape above their heads that keeps going back and forth like a swivel in a piece of machinery. Other variations follow. A rhythm settles in and a quiet, yet steady flow of energy is being spread towards the audience.
With every iteration, every performer’s placement change, the spectators’ perception loosens its grip on the human shape, on the “legs-at-the-bottom-hips-then-torso-with-head-at-the-top” paradigm. The focus shifts elsewhere, towards single body parts, their texture, their faculties and own presence.
The performers eventually sit down and roll the legs of their trousers up to their knees. Their shins appear and shimmer in the soft light. Hands rest on knees and an “intra-bodily” communication develops between their feet, lower legs, knees, elbows and arms.

At this point the piece’s costume design plays itself out to the fullest: The performers are clothed in a black shirt and a pair of black trousers, the fabric soft, strikingly plain and highly light absorbent. Yet, they help the performers blend in with the overall darkness of the scenography, and then – by blocking out the view of some parts of the body – direct the audience’s attention to select parts of the performer’s body, very much akin to the barn shutters of a stage light. In doing so, the plain dark clothes give a very restricted, yet highly focussed view on them, their texture, their action.
This effect is strengthened by light technician Bruno Pocheron’s highly crafted lighting design, subtly playing the gamut from white to rose and orange at varying degrees of luminosity, shrouding the performer’s body shape at times with contours that appear drawn into space with a fine ink pen, to then suffuse them back into twilight.

The process is accompanied by a subtle soundscape of dark trickles created by composer Damir Šimunović. The trickles are being occasionally augmented by a performer’s arm swipe on the floor which must be discretely picked up by a contact microphone underneath a tatami mat.

The work “Bodies of Light” stands in a series of portraits, Isabelle Schad has been creating over the course of several years, and is in direct lineage with “Solo für Lea mit Claudia” which premiered at Sophiensäle back in 2016. Here like then, we engage in constellations of forming and disfiguring, where the specifics of the performer’s body take on centre stage, its uniqueness emerging through an array of laboured movement motifs and patterns.

In “Bodies of Light”, we’ll find a distant echo of “Différence et Répétition” a work by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze [i] from 1968. In Schad’s portraits repetition acts as a choreographic tool that helps emerge a form of human identity which comprises both resemblance and distinction. No body is the same in Schad’s work and still, the body is everyone’s, universally unique. Repetition helps for difference to be seen: the body becomes alien, and by becoming alien, it becomes truly itself.

The piece arrives at its end in a cascading of head hair that Lee and Tomasi repeatedly whip up in the air with both their hands. Thighs engaged, little steps to have one or the other be in the foreground, we witness these spikes of energy being shot into every direction until the lights go out.

After a twenty minutes break for a quick set change, “Close by, So far – Landscapes of Infinity” unfolds, with a similarly unpretentious, matter-of-factly presentation of affairs to that of “Bodies of Light”.,
The dancers David Kummer and Viviana Defazio, dressed in plain clothes, sit on five large fabric bands which are suspended at the top of the stage’s back wall, covering the stage floor and stretching well into the audience’s first row like an oversized flag. The colours are soft and earthy: beige, grey and light brown to ochre.
Defazio rests on her back, Kummer kneels behind her, gently kneading and twisting her raised right arm.

Despite a certain kinship in terms of sober aesthetics with “Bodies of Light”, we enter an entirely different terrain in “Close by, So far”. The stage is fully lit, no focus is being re-directed. It is at the spectator’s discretion to navigate from action to action, of which there are many on stage: rolling, gentle stretches, observations, interventions, duets, trios, quartets.

The movement vocabulary has its roots in Shiatsu, a Japanese healing practice of gentle manipulation: we see how performers touch each other, caringly: One lifts up a white sheet for the other to lean into like in a comfortable deckchair. Bodies are being stretched, joints are opened, energies released. There’s a certain fluency in the performers’ gestures that reaches beyond Shiatsu’s own hand and body placement repertoire, and moves towards a communication through touch which colours the dancers’ interactions on stage.

Some words have to be said about the presence of performers Arantxa Martínez and Alessandra Defazio. From the very beginning of the piece, Martínez sits on a black folding chair at the very back of the stage, undresses quietly and reaches the fabric bands – centre stage – in a state of complete nudity. She is the only one – to one single exception towards the end of the piece – who remains mostly nude, while taking over Alessandra Defazio’s arm movement for instance, or observing quietly from the edges of the stage.

Martínez is the “body”, a physical reference. For “Close by, So far – Landscapes of Infinity” she acts as a sort of female version of Le Corbusier’s “modulor” [ii], a reminder that we are all, underneath our layers of clothes, fabric, make-up and hair-do, a composition of bones and skin, that we all have energies inside us which sometimes move, sometimes get stuck.

It is thanks to Martínez’ particular stage presence that we never drift off into other realms of association when we witness her nudity. She walks on stage, determined, present, but not overly self-conscious, at ease, but not eager to show. We appreciate her interventions like a peak into
the “every-body” that lies within us, her particular version of being herself harmoniously coexistent to other versions of being oneself.

Alessandra Defazio’s role is different. Fully dressed, appearing and disappearing from behind the suspended sheets, highly active in her movements, at times doubling up with her twin sister, dancer Viviana Defazio, she seems to be the “you”.
More direct than Martínez, her interactions stretch into the audience as much as the laid out sheets: “I am you, and you are me. I am different and I am similar. We are singular and we are kin.” The soundscape is rich, marked by an instability and sudden changes, if not to say rushing from scene to scene: there’s the sound of blowing wind, exhalations of a human voice, static enmeshed with a small violin motif.

In “Close by, So far – Landscapes of Infinity”, the subject of personhood is handled differently than in “Bodies of Light”. Here, the exchange between the performers is not only energetic, but also social: there are gazes, smiles, there are intentions towards each other: performer Alessandra Defazio watches the other three moving, all the while being comfortably stretched out on the floor, propped up on her elbow. Viviana Defazio and David Kummer duet in a cheeky arm throw that has Kummer hop and Defazio pose. Another moment sees Martínez, changed into light-coloured trousers, comment the treatments with the scraping sound of a cabasa.

Schad’s work is political, but it is a politicalness which foregoes raised fists, petitions and pamphlets. The affirmation is elsewhere: when watching “Bodies of Light” and “Close by, So far – Landscapes of Infinity”, the absence of ego in the performers can be strikingly felt, and it is this very absence which paves the way to another understanding of being oneself: “I am unique, but my uniqueness doesn’t exclude others. It exists and is dependent through others.”

This realisation leads me to the multiple definitions of “Ubuntu”, a concept of self and being in the world which has its origins with the Bantu people in South, Central and East Africa.
According to Nigerian scholar Michael Onyebuchi Eze, the core of Ubuntu can be described as follows:
“A person is a person through other people strikes an affirmation of one’s humanity through recognition of an “other” in his or her uniqueness and difference. It is a demand for a creative intersubjective formation in which the “other” becomes a mirror (but only a mirror) for my subjectivity. This idealism suggests to us that humanity is not embedded in my person solely as an individual; my humanity is co-substantively bestowed upon the other and me. Humanity is a quality we owe to each other. We create each other and need to sustain this otherness creation. And if we belong to each other, we participate in our creations: we are because you are, and since you are, definitely I am. The “I am” is not a rigid subject, but a dynamic self-constitution dependent on this otherness creation of relation and distance.” [iii]

Schad values the human body in all its particularities and qualities, its capacity to be both alien and familiar. In so doing, she is keen to see energies shared amongst the performers and the spectators, based on a deep understanding that – without exception – all human beings are elements of a larger ecosystem, where we all give and receive in equal measures, unique and connected that we are.

[i] Différence et Répétitions. Gilles Deleuze, Presses universitaires de France (PUF), 1968.
[ii] The Modulor is an anthropometric scale of proportions devised by the Swiss-born French architect Le Corbusier (1887–1965). It is based on the height of a man with his arm raised, similar to the “Vitruvian Man”. The Modulor considered the standard human height as 1.83 m, ignoring female measures. It was used as a referential system for a number of Le Corbusier’s buildings (Cité Radieuse in Marseille) and was later codified into two books.
[iii] Intellectual History in Contemporary South Africa. M. O. Eze, London, Palgrave, 2010 pp. 190–191