Wim Vandekeybus / Ultima Vez & KVS: Hands do not touch your precious Me

Wim Vandekeybus (1963) is a choreographer, dancer, filmmaker and photographer. He founded his dance company, Ultima Vez, in the mid-eighties. He made a remarkable artistic debut with his first performance What the body does not remember (1987). The performance won a Bessie, an award granted for groundbreaking work. His second performance, Les porteuses de mauvaises nouvelles (1989), was also honoured with this award. In his unique style, Vandekeybus has created milestones in the development of modern dance with his performances over the last few decades, at home and abroad. 

Vandekeybus has developed a signature language of movement wherein he juxtaposes intuition, impulse and instinct with energy, risk and danger, which exemplifies a dramatic Weltanschauung, full of dynamics and conflict, through the medium of dance. A central focus in his work is the irreconcilable conflict between body and mind, feeling and intellect, man and woman, nature and culture, man and animal, group and individual, illusion and reality. Vandekeybus’ work is characterised by almost obsessive reiterations of one single concern: how man responds to extreme situations. In this context, he attaches special importance to what he refers to as ‘the moment of catastrophe’ – which, ironically, does not preclude his inclusion of humour, playfulness and even a certain jocular light-heartedness in his work. 

With Hands do not touch your precious Me, Wim Vandekeybus creates a mythical tale of confrontation and transformation, light and darkness, death and rebirth. For this he collaborates with the composer Charo Calvo, eight dancers and – for the first time – with performer and visual artist Olivier de Sagazan. Together they create a world in which bodies balance like living, fleshly sculptures between the utopian and the gruesome, the powerful and the fragile. The poetic, mysterious title is a verse taken from a hymn by the Sumerian High Priestess Enheduanna to the goddess Inanna. 

Of all the myths surrounding the goddess Inanna, her spectacular descent into the underworld is the most intriguing. Inanna is the divine embodiment of the paradoxes of human existence, and her deeds are a reflection of the tensions and contradictions that every person is forced to navigate in life. Inscribed on clay tablets in cuneiform over 4,000 years ago, these are some of humankind’s most ancient stories. Regardless of their different styles, the performances by both Wim Vandekeybus and Olivier de Sagazan balance on the line of what it means to be ‘body’ and ‘man’.

At the core of de Sagazan’s work is the transfiguration of the body and the face with clay and paint into a lump of anonymous flesh. Vandekeybus’ and de Sagazan’s exploration of human limits finds a musical echo in the material and physical texture of Charo Calvo’s electroacoustic music.
 

Wim Vandekeybus and Maria Kolegova Workshop 
Friday, 14 April 2023, 10.00–13.00, Duša Počkaj Hall 

In cooperation with Ultima Vez & KVS, Cankarjev dom is hosting a free workshop for professional dancers, choreographers and performers. The workshop will be conducted by Wim Vandekeybus, the founder of the touring dance company, and dancer Maria Kolegova. Vandekeybus reflection provides the starting point for the workshop: 

“Dancing for me is being guided by a strong inner intuition rather than by technique. Movements are to communicate, with yourself as an honest expression and with others to communicate. Movement is like talking, singing, laughing…. As long as it tells something that has to be told as an urge, like an impulse, unstoppable. Therefore, dancing is close to theater. A carrier of inner states which are shared to tell stories.”

The workshop is full. No more places available.