Perpetual Archive

Perpetual Archive

Duration 60 min.
Premiere 18.12.2019 Uferstudios, Berlin
Shows 2020 Uferstudios Berlin, Kunstverein Arnsberg, neun Ingolstadt – Flamenco Festival
2022 Sophiensaele, Berlin –Tanztage

Concept, Choreography, Performance:  Ana Lessing Menjibar
Music Composition: Ana Lessing Menjibar & Philipp Kullen
Music: Philipp Kullen
Dramaturgy: Vera Fenyvesi Köppern 
Video and Set Design: Ana Lessing Menjibar
Costume: Eric Winkler 
Light Design: Ana Lessing Menjibar & Margie Medlin 
Light Operator: Kike Garcia
Technical Director: Nikola Pieper
Mentor: Jeremy Wade, Sandra Umathum, Monica Bonvicini 
Tutor: Sophia New

Between an ecstatic and formal investigation, Ana Lessing Menjibar experiments with a cultural legacy gathered from her flamenco background. She opens this archive to reveal a series of states, creatures and concepts of spaces.

This journey includes a digital and energetic feedback loop, a vulnerable dialogue of inner and outer bodily sounds and rhythms. In a hybrid space somewhere between installation and the black box theatre, Lessing Menjibar’s research decomposes flamenco to transform it within the field of performance art.

Special thanks to Sandra Noeth, Rhys Martin,Nik Haffner and Angela Schubot.

Produced by Ana Lessing Menjibar & HZT Berlin | Artistic Director: Nik Haffner | Administration Manager: Sabine Trautwein | Team MA Solo/Dance/Authorship: Prof. Rhys Martin, Prof. Dr. Sandra Noeth, Sophia New | Production Manager: Juan Gabriel Harcha | Advisor Production Design: Stephan Kostropetsch | Light Advisor: Margie Medlin | Technical Director: Max Stelzl | Sound: Nikola Pieper | Stage: Fabian Bleisch, Jan Römer, Stephan Müller, Kiana Rezvani, Kike García | Communication: Judith Brückmann, Mamady Wegat | Foto Documentation: Marion Borriss | Office: Elsa Goulko

Flamenco is an art form based on the collective agreement to listen to the single body’s wound. You merge with the other, you become the other. “Sensing is sharing” (Arno Böhler, 2019). This collective agreement on sharing and sensing transforms pain into energy, empowerment and even joy. Performance as a collective emotional and energetic journey?

In Perpetual Archive, Ana Lessing Menjibar investigates this question, set in a hybrid space between installation and black box theatre. Here, improvisation, choreography, and composition are used to explore the relationship between body, sound, and space to reveal a series of states, to construct a poetic-surreal world holding an emotional and energetic journey. To build a polyhedral, -morphic and -metric experiences: a quest to share, where the individual and the universal, intimacy and excess, silence, tides and poiesis, dreams, monsters and wounds find their coexistence at the moment in this space; a space for plasticity, where the apollonian and the dionysian can merge.

As a foundation for this journey, Ana Lessing Menjibar investigates Flamenco and its transformative potential within contemporary performance practice, exploring its compositional strategies, rhythms, sounds and movement qualities. And considering the body as a source for rhythm and sound, she uses in dialogue with the musician Philipp Kullen arrangements of organic and digital sounds to investigate the emotional and energetic impact of what the body produces.