Universal and individual
On the opening night, we bring back artists that are well known to the SPRING audience. Marta Górnicka (Polish artist from Berlin) and Mette Ingvartsen (Danish choreographer from Brussels) both present their latest productions, coproduced by SPRING. For MOTHERS A SONG FOR WARTIME, Górnicka invited 21 women from Ukraine, Belarus and Poland who have been directly affected by Russia’s current aggression. In RUSH, Ingvartsen focuses our attention on one of her closest collaborators, Manon Santkin, and on twenty years of working together. Although both performances are very different in scale, topic, and aesthetics, both artists share a search for tensions between wat is common and what is individual: how individual biographies can cover universal topics, and how universal stories can be updated through individual stories.
This topic is one of the most important points in the programme for the next edition of SPRING. Michikazu Matsune and Martine Pisani’s new creation Kono atari no dokoka (Somewhere around here) is centered around artists who have a new look at the body of their earlier work. Two productions examine the relationship between the Netherlands and Indonesia: who owns this story, in the past as well as now, and how this story is constructed. collection of…, a production by the Polish duo Turkowski&Nowacka, premieres in Utrecht, while The Indonesian Dialogues from the ad hoc multinational collective There will be film comes to Utrecht directly after its Swiss premiere.
Yet another way to approach personal stories can be seen in the production of another artists who regularly returns to SPRING, Jaha Koo. His Haribo Kimchi emphasizes food – its cultural, but also its political dimensions. Short personal biographies connected to large societal transformations inspired Nahuel Cano’s production. Ways to listen to a river bridges two communities who live by rivers: the Limay in the far away Patagonia where Cano was born, and de Vecht by Utrecht. Another bridge, this time between Brazil and the Netherlands, is created by Leandro Souza. His Musa Insistente looks for ways to escape the traps of representation, through a body and mind that is ingrained in three different realities which still decide the (post)colonial world of today.
Between several ‘finished’ productions, SPRING also presents a work-in-progress. The Amsterdam-based Ukrainian artist and microbiologist Ira Melkonyan is going to share the first phase of her artistic research Blood Thirsty, about physical and metaphorical values of blood – as a biological source of life, and a cultural deadly threat. Finally, Ant Hampton, who returns to Utrecht after ten years, invites us to travel through Europe together with him. Borderline Visible is a unique experience of collectively reading a book, and an extremely moving encounter with the complexity of the cultural and political reality on the whole continent throughout the centuries.
Different relations between artists and audiences
Hampton’s work is part of a series of projects in which artists are looking for other ways to build relations between artists and audiences: the definitive breaking of the fourth wall between the stage and the house. In Lake Life, Kate McIntosh proposes to an intergenerational audience a playful game in which we reimagine the reality between us, the way in which we operate within that and how we interact with each other. Celine Daemen once again invites us into her VR world and proposes a magical journey in Songs for a Passerby, in which the boundary between us as spectators and participants in the imaginary reality dissolves. Begüm Erciyas invites us to Hands Made – an installation that you can only experience with your hands, drawing our attention to how technology and the development of civilization are changing the interface of our hands.
