OCEAN
you can write Atlantic on the ocean, it only says so much about what is really there
CREDITS
A performative sculpture by Dani/ela Bershan, 2021
creation icw. Aubrey Birch, Sara Leghissa and Sabrina Seifried
currently performed by: Dani/ela Bershan, Roni Katz, Sara Leghissa
past performances with: Aubrey Birch, Kate McIntosh
set and objects: Dani/ela Bershan
sound concept & live sound: Dani/ela Bershan
costumes: Sabrina Seifried
energy Coaching: Fi James
video: Christopher Daley
co-/production: Performing Arts Forum, MDT, Goethe Institute Stockholm, Kunstencentrum Buda, Centre-Pompidou Kanal
special thanks to: Jan Ritsema, Bojana Cvejič, Berno Odo Polzer,
Sarah Parolin, Kate McIntosh
TOUR
Centre-Pompidou Kanal, BE
Kunstencentrum Buda, BE
Performing Arts Forum, FR
Oslo Internasjonale Teaterfestival, NO
Somabog / Berlin Art Week, DE
IKOB Museum for Contemporary Art, BE
Museum Forum Alte Post, DE
NOMINATIONS
Feminist Art Prize 2022, IKOB Museum
SHORT DESCRIPTION
Participants are invited to take their bed placed around the circular scene of a ritual. They can make themselves comfortable in the 360° set-up of OCEAN, sit or lay down or move around it’s core. Three performers are moving to the sounds and rhythms of breath, while the live-soundtrack composed of chanting and breathing slowly transforms from intimacy to vastness. Alongside unfolding gestures, sounds, and objects of regeneration, OCEAN seeks to merge and honour familiar acts of reproductive labour and the sacred feminine on a horizontal plane.
Feminine energy and intelligence has been systematically suppressed for thousands of years. A key tool of patriarchal oppression is the mystification and suppression of the feminine. When we suppress the feminine, we also suppress something fundamental to all human existence. We allow separation and division to take over, we isolate the other - whether the other is human or not.
As a manifestation of care, OCEAN sets the intention to overcome this division and to rehearse present connections. A ritual is a shared embodiment of intention that can assist to uncover and align deep values and meanings which people live by.
OCEAN is a possibility to decompose oneself alongside others, a collective, experimental, spiritual moment - not as the affirmation or construction of a supernatural or religious belief system but as an earthly insisting on concrete relations to the material, visible and tangible values of reproducing our lives on a day to day basis in a more- and other -than-human-world.
We have forgotten that blood is sea water. All land life does not simply represent life from the sea but forms another type of sea itself, a terrestrial sea connected by all tissue, sap and lymph that constitute it *. Even matter may travel and separate, it is always linked materially and energetically.
OCEAN reminds us that we are much more resourceful and connected than we allow ourselves to be.
* from Sadie Plant Zeros and Ones, 1998
SETUP
360° stage on stage
minimum diameter installation: 7,5m
minimum dimensions space: 10 x 10m
durational, length variable: 3-8h
WATCH OCEAN TRAILER
OCEAN REVIEWS & PRESS
OCEAN REVIEWS & PRESS
OCEAN or: the touch of
a relational lifeworld
by Bojana Cvejič
Sometimes, a performance, a work of art, reveals its timeliness in a time that does not favor its public appearance. Circumstances happen, and they hinder its reception, and while the work of mounting a performance for few occasions for too few spectators might seem disappointingly vain to its makers, the performance still finds other ways of working through to us, reaching the spectators who couldn’t experience the full event. Like sprouting new tentacles that will extend it into other modes of existence — a map, a conversation, a rehearsal, a rumor — the work begins to live in the mythical glow of incompleteness. This condition is not unusual for those artworks of which we cherish the most vivid memories even if we only saw a glimpse of them.
I was among the few clandestinely drawn into the circle of OCEAN during its rehearsals in March 2021, when arguably, the pandemic with its austere restriction of public gatherings suspended the performing arts at large. In a glass building (Kanal Pompidou), originally devised for showcasing automobiles on a busy junction in Brussels (Square Sainctelette), a ritualistic performance sculpture transpired for what seemed to be long hours. Indifferent to the noisy traffic outside, which recalled me to a world ominously threatening to choke us, we gathered around a circle in which three persons dwelled and, at times, occupied themselves with laborious actions. One was kneading dough for bread, while another one was preparing tea in a samovar; the third one singing. The chant seemed to color a long breath: a motif of a few tones patterned like a call (question) and response, ascending and descending, and repeating over and over again. The circular motion of the chant emulated the rhythm of breathing, evening out long inhalations and exhalations. It reminded me of the exercises in which one calms their spirits, or a mood of distress, by breathing into and with the whole body. The “songing” of the breath served to sharply separate out the time-space of OCEAN set against the city.
>>> READ THE FULL REVIEW @ ETCETERA MAGAZINE
Die Kunst der Berührung
SWR Kulturmagazin
Everything comes from somewhere and everything is always already here…
>>> READ THE FULL Q&A WITH DANIELA BERSHAN @ BERLIN ART WEEK
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