hip piece

Rhythms that put hips in motion and make the bottoms jiggle and quiver: Shake your booty! We start the new season with choreographing duo Verena Billinger & Sebastian Schulz. Their hip piece is dedicated to the body’s core, the centre of desire and lust, the motor of dance. On stage: six dancers who have been inducted into the secrets of swinging one’s hips by experts on hip hop, Afro Dance, dancehall, belly dancing, and twerking. They present their approach to those newly-learned movements to us – at times playfully and exuberantly, at times demure and vulnerable. Because a situation may change swiftly if the hips rotate on stage or in the club – the killjoys of undesirable eroticisation and exoticisation enter the fray. It will be exciting to see how Billinger & Schulz are going to combine poignant physicalness with an analytical approach, once more this time. Following their legendary dance performances on kissing and on violence, it becomes clear yet again: Bodies and body parts are never detached from their context in society, art, or popular culture. And still, dance holds the promise to unshackle itself from the ascriptions to become more than meets the eye at first glance.