Lilo & Marc keep on living an everyday passive activism: a being together that regards mutual responsibility and care as radically indispensable. Since some years we have found a performativity in our dance practice that lies between intimacy, distance, closeness, anaesthesia of the sexual body, humor, frustration, excitement and boredom that has gained a new urgency for us. We are more than ever convinced that our way of collaboration is politically and socially relevant in the context of normative society.
The research WHERE WE ARE NOW that we want to lead in Kahvila Saha stems from our last residency in 2016 at Cullberg, Stockholm. It follows the thread and claims a space for radical empathy. At the core of the movement material that we would like to work on lies the improvisation practice “Doing the same thing for three hours”. Here we undergo an infinitive variety of “doing the same thing”, a seemingly banal practice that brings up deep personal and social questions: are we moving in exactly the same way (is that even possible?), are we feeling the same thing, gazing in the same direction, are we part of the same situation, presence or future?
As our experience showed us, this practice is not only an interesting starting point for a choreographic and interdisciplinary research but also a state of mind which can help resolving inter-relational conflict. It can easily be brought outside of the context of art making and we would like to expand this research to the making of a performance but also share it with a broader audience in the form of workshop.
As Lilo & Marc between 2014 and 2016 we have researched radical intimacy. We conducted different experiments pushing the limits of our togetherness. Our questions were: How would it feel to never be alone? What kind of exhaustion or energy boost would come up in being together extensively? Togetherness can be much more than the invariably romanticised archetypical couple of “man” and “woman”. There are countless lived forms defining oneself as a couple. We have been interested in becoming a new entity that could exist as such in our social surrounding: We stayed in physical contact with each other for 24 hours. Then we kissed for 39 hours over 15 days in a museum. And finally we stayed no more than three meters away from each other for two weeks, attached through a string.
Marc Philipp Gabriel is a Berlin based choreographer working between body, voice, and video from the perspective of dance and movement, offering unconventional angles on social norms and future models of how to be together on and with planet Earth. Collaborators include Tino Seghal, Michael Portnoy, Helena Botto, Lea Moro, Liselotte Singer. His productions AJIMA (with Maija Karhunen) and DOWN TO EARTH (with Kieron Jina) have toured major dance venues in Europe and South Africa. Marc holds a BA in Choreography from the University of Arts Berlin (2015), received the danceWEB scholarship (Vienna, 2013) and the Pina Bausch Fellowship (2019). marcphilippgabriel.com
Liselotte Singer comes from France and grew up near Nîmes. After a ballet course in the conservatory of Nîmes, a light circus training in Montpellier and some contemporary dance classes while studying applied art in Paris, she graduated in 2015 of the BA « Dance, Context, Choreography » in HZT (udk) in Berlin. Having as well concluded the 2016 SMASH 3 months intensive training in experimental physical performance, she worked as performer for Tino Sehgal, Cécile Bally, Clément Layes, Emily Randford and as choreography assistant for Barbara Berti. She is as well collaborating closely with Marc P. Gabriel since 2014.
Her interest is triggered when her perception and understanding of the world sharpens; it’s what she is looking for through physical practices, collaborative works, readings, writing, describing feelings, navigating through different cultural contexts, traveling and taking long walks in and outside of the city.
Profile photo: Marc's photo Sarnt Utamachote, Liselotte's photo Jonny Brooking
