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Together with her team, Hamburg-based choreographer and dancer Antje Pfundtner developed a piece for everyone 8 years and older \u2013 as part of explore dance \u2013 Tanzpakt Stadt-Land-Bund<\/em>.\u00a0F\u00fcr mich<\/em>\u00a0(For me) deals with the central questions of life and is at the same time (re)dedicated to its young audience, the actual initiators of the piece. <\/strong><\/p>\n Written by Katrin Ullmann<\/p>\n <\/p>\n One thing is for sure: to watch a dance piece together with a young audience is as rare as it is unusual. Long before the doors open, excited laughter sounds through the foyer, colorful gum bubbles explode every couple of seconds, people are jostled and pushed and, when everyone is finally seated, sitting still seems out of the question. A lot of energy pulses through the room. Untamed, impetuous, and undisturbed. But what does it actually look like to create a dance piece for a young audience? Where do you start? Or does a choreographer even want \u2013 or can and will she \u2013 work in an artistically different way, just because she knows the particular age range of the audience? \u201cAs a director, I found myself wondering what I do or should do differently. I think that is mostly a structural or societal problem. Young people should go to the theatre a lot more anyways and you should not have to produce something just for them,\u201d says Antje Pfundtner when formulating first thoughts regarding her commissioned work, which is part of explore dance \u2013 Netzwerk Tanz f\u00fcr junges Publikum \u2014 Tanzpakt Stadt-Land-Bund<\/em>. It is easily discernible that Pfundtner has her doubts, that she almost questions herself and the given framework a little bit. And yet for her and her team, engaging with the \u201ctarget audience 8+\u201d will be a central aspect of her work. Not because Pfundtner has dissolved all of her doubts, but because she has returned to her own, always research-based work method.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n As she often does in her works, she here once again \u2013\u00a0 or here especially \u2013 gets in touch with the audience, whom she integrates into the process of developing and rehearsing the play. The future young audience becomes a core aspect of the piece; it is interviewed as its driving force. Representing their age group are approximately two dozen children and teenagers ranging from 8 to 16 years. Pfundtner and her team engaged in conversations with them: \u201cI fell into a trap, and did so quite consciously. Because I interviewed them, they of course became essential to the piece. They are its point of departure.\u201d In her interviews, she tried to find out what the young people are interested in, and also what interests her. In her piece for explore dance \u2013 Netzwerk Tanz f\u00fcr junges Publikum \u2014 Tanzpakt Stadt-Land-Bund\u00a0<\/em>she decidedly does not want to create something that fulfills a service function, something that is only and exclusively designed to work for one target group. Instead, it appears that what she extracts from numerous conversations with the children and teenagers are the larger questions of life, particularly one central question: \u201cwhat do people not ask you often enough?\u201d It is an essential question, one that Antje Pfundtner and her team are also intrigued by. It is at this point that the clear line between the generations appears to dissolve. As a consequence, the team\u2019s research tackles philosophical topics just as much as age-specific sensibilities. This is how the performers establish a close connection to the audience, and this intimacy is exactly what works.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Was ihr wollt<\/em>(what you want) is the working title of the piece that Antje Pfundtner will later call F\u00fcr mich<\/em>\u00a0(for me) and which she developed together with her team and dancers Juliana Oliveira and Norbert Pape. As a consequence, Pfundtner perceives the piece as an homage, as a re-homage to the young people that inspired it. They are its driving force, its indirect protagonists. The age recommendation \u201c8+\u201d is, however, difficult to pin down, since it is as diverse as the audience of every performance. While some members of the audience may appear irritated or overwhelmed, other teenagers will loudly disrupt the performance with energetic comments. Elementary school kids, on the other hand, may grow very silent and serious, offering nuanced and smart feedback in the conversations after the show. The adolescent audience generates \u2013 as in a tree\u2019s annual rings \u2013 a different and always individual (self)perception of its physicality with every new year of its life, a fact that permanently opens up new intellectual windows. Pfundtner, Oliveira, and Pape seek to open them up widely: \u201cThis next dance is for you alone!\u201d they call out to the audience and begin, dressed in bright red sweat suits, to confront them with joyful power. They throw their own and others\u2019 statements into the room, tell personal stories, and in doing so open up a space for the audience\u2019s own stories. They provoke physical closeness, dance a simple Step-Touch followed by the popular floss dance from the Fortnite computer game. Both dances consist of continually looped moved whose easy repetitions tell stories of movements and dance \u2013 while at the same time questioning them in a self-ironic way.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n The performances are familiar with their audience\u2019s codes. \u00a0They irritate the children with a sincere Pas de deux, they get very close to them, ask awkward questions and move beyond their boundaries (of shame). At one point, they walk across the room burping and moving along very softly. Then again, they adapt jump-style moves with such energy that a few teenagers can no longer stay seated. The audience sits in close proximity to the performers, their rows of chairs immediately frame an almost empty stage. They cannot evade the performance, but have to give in to it. The performers, on the other hand, seek out eye contact and maintain it, they immediately integrate them into their dance, their game. Norbert Pape repeats the seemingly harmless question \u201ctogether or separate?\u201d, initially referring to his hands, which he holds closely together, or his feet, which stand next to each other. The audience responds by calling out the answer. From here, he develops an at one point personal, at another point political round of questions: \u201cmy parents \u2013 together or separate?\u201d, \u201cyour parents \u2013 together or separate?\u201d, \u201cGermany \u2013 together or separate?\u201d, \u201cEurope \u2013together or separate?\u201d.F\u00fcr mich<\/em>\u00a0works extremely well as a dance performance for young people. Probably because the piece is a little like its audience: unrestrained and full of energy, open and unpredictable.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n But is this really how it works? Would the piece be a different one if it did not come with the age recommendation \u201c8+\u201d? Would it be less unrestrained and energetic, less permeable and unpredictable? Probably not. This ascription is probably generated mostly through the guided glance. The piece could probably be seen and experienced in the same and thus also in a very different way by an audience consisting solely of adults. Of course the \u201cthe information of these young people is somewhere in there,\u201d Pfundtner concedes, and adds: \u201cbut since it also speaks to me, couldn\u2019t you also say that it is a piece for 42-year old women living in a big city?\u201d After having performed in different venues, at different times of the day, and with a different age range in the audience, Pfundtner comes to the conclusion that \u201cit works best when we have a completely mixed audience.\u201d At the end of a performance where this was the case, the entire audience stood up and danced, took over the sage, imitated movements from the show \u2013 almost as if the performance simply continued, the choreographer remembers and thus newly asks herself and the involved institutions: \u201cwhy don\u2019t we turn every G-rated piece into a matin\u00e9e or a 6pm family performance?\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n For Pfundtner the question whether you can determine a particular target group and whether dance can be produced for a specific age range remains essentially open. If such an ascription happens in advance, it should happen as late as possible in the rehearsal process, says Pfundtner when speaking about her experience.<\/p>\n Did the ascription change anything for her, on an aesthetic and artistic level? \u201cOf course you want to resist the demands that come with a target group, and yet this is a central piece of information.\u201d At the same time, the age specification remains difficult for her: \u201cThe age group that we focused on in our research were teenagers ranging from 13 to 16 years. But when you have mostly younger kids on stage (for instance 6-10 year-olds), not everything in the piece will work out. As a performer, you have a good sense of the audience\u2019s attention \u2013 and you can consciously guide it through the production. A very young audience, for instance, sometimes likes to remain in the rush of affective situations. You have to know that as a performer in order to be able to get their attention back. A mixed audience automatically compensates for such things. But when the audience consists solely of children that are younger than the research target group, I do begin to wonder whether I would have developed the piece differently if I had produced it specifically for them. And that is when I again fall into the trap. Or don\u2019t I?\u201d<\/p>\n She laughs and adds, sounding almost a little ironic with regard to the whole endeavor: \u201cAfter a few performances, the organizers said that they could imagine showing the piece to an adult audience, too.\u201d Because they felt, as they said: \u201cit was also FOR ME – F\u00dcR MICH.\u201d<\/p>\n [\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row] <\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" ANTJE PFUNDTNER IN COMPANY:\u00a0FOR ME […]<\/p>\nIN TOUCH WITH THE TARGET AUDIENCE<\/h3>\n
PHYSICAL INTIMACY AS PLAYFUL PROVOCATION<\/h3>\n
FULL OF ENERGY, OPEN, AND UNPREDICTABLE<\/h3>\n
A GUIDED GLANCE, A MIXED AUDIENCE<\/h3>\n
GOOD TIMING AND THE RUSH OF AFFECT<\/h3>\n