AGADA / Rotem Weissman & nein9 kollektiv

Rotem Weissman / 9nein kollektiv /

AGADA is derived from the Hebrew song “Agada Yapanit” (Japanese Fable), written by Ehud Manor and composed by Ariel Zilber in 1972. The song describes a pointless tragedy about blind ambition precipitating absurd and unnecessary violence, with an implication that this cycle is inevitable.

In Agada, the song is utilized as the guiding thread of both the embodiment of each character, and the structure of the performance as a score, both playing between the mimesis of the song and its dismantling. The score builds up to its own destruction, and as such the end of the performance is never wholly predetermined. Bridging to an empathic relation between the performers and the spectators.

As the piece progresses, its imagery, physicality, and expressivity accumulate to bring forth a critical tension between connection, interaction, isolation, and dissociation. It shepherds its audience toward all-too-familiar sensations; the shift from purpose to purposelessness and the choice to resist or surrender to absurdity. As ordered life breaks down, authentic beauty, violence, innocence and struggle all arise. The result is a cathartic celebration of the extremes of human experience. Agada emerged as an appeal to empathy: the physiological ability to feel like another, and to make a collective shift. In conflict to its theme of separation, Agada works with longing of and for communion, that of spiritual connection and communication to one another.

Rotem Weissman & nein9 kollektiv will present the premiere of AGADA as part of the Blank Check Festival on March 12, 2022 at Acker Stadt Palast; the production can be seen at DOCK 11 on March 13, 2022.

Emerging choreographer Rotem Weissman has developed and deepened her movement language across each of her works, of which Agada is the most recent. Her tone is characterized by use of joint articulation and separation, and contrast between tense and slack, fractured and released movements. All are coming to life in relation with the music and its themes. Weissman works with the imagination, asking how a body can discover and express the performer’s fantasies through movement. She is fascinated with the ‘gap’, the space for translation and interpretation between her body and the performers'. Working with materials drawn from her own improvisation practise, the creation process unfolds as a dialogue between one body/imagination and others through interaction, reaction, and fantasy. More https://www.rotemweissman.com and https://www.nein9kollektiv.de

Choreography, Concept Rotem Weissman Dancers Ariel Hayun, Jin Lee, Raz Mantell, Ruby Frances Jones, Susanna Ylikosk Dramaturgy Zuki Ringart

Production by 9nein kollektiv in cooperation with Acker Stadt Palast and DOCK 11

Tanz Meets Residency at the Tanz Station Barmer Bahnhof Wuppertal

With thanks to Lena Klink

Rotem Weissman & das 9nein kollektiv participate in #share, a digital video format from Acker Stadt Palast.

Funded by Neustart - Bundesverband Soziokultur - Die Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien und Berliner Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa.