3 performer, 1 technician, 1 DJ
Space: 8m x 8m
Duration: ca. 0:45 h
Premiere: 07.04.2016
In collaboration with: Theater im Ballsaal Bonn, Malévoz Quartier Culturel, Théâtre du Crochetan Monthey (CH)
Funded by: Ministerium für Familie, Kinder, Jugend, Kultur und Sport des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen, Bundesstadt Bonn, Théâtre-ProVS, Le Conseil de la Culture Etat du Valais, La Loterie Romande.
With (current line-up): András Déri, Álvaro Esteban, Daniel Morales • By (original line-up): Álvaro Esteban, Werner Nigg, Andi Xhuma • Choreography: Rafaële Giovanola
• Composition/ DJing: Franco Mento
• Light, Space: Marc Brodeur • Parkour Workshop: Frédéric Voeffray • Choreographic Assistance: Fa-Hsuan Chen • Dramaturgy: Rainald Endraß • Management: Mechtild Tellmann • Photos: Klaus Fröhlich
• Video trailer: Michael Maurissens
ABOUT MOMENTUM
MOMENTUM makes a connection between the dancers and the audience through the palpable feeling of movement in a shared space. The dancers and the audience alike absorb the evolving kinetic energy just like the exhaustion, which become the driving elements of the performance.
Only the rhythm and speed unite the movements in a structural dimension. The pure physical, sweat-inducing choreography and the fusion of light and sound are generating a hypnotic energy.
Nomination "Dancer of the Year" in the critics' poll of the specialist journal “tanz” 2018 by Dorion Weickmann (Süddeutsche Zeitung, Jahrbuch tanz 2018
PRESS CLIPPINGS
- MOMENTUM at the DANCEPLATFORM GERMANY 2018
As soon as the three men find their voice and roar, the piece stops. Even before the language, the philosophy, the politics. MOMENTUM is embodied physics, in the sense of impulse or "momentum". This is also precisely how the dance bores itself into the moment”, the raw moment. (tanz, March 2018)
The audience, in unison, succumbed to the lure and ecstasy of movement ignited by the three stocking masked young men in Rafaële Giovanola's MOMENTUM arena. … MOMENTUM safely balanced on the narrow ridge between proto-fascist testosterone-fueled swaggering and the longing for a symbiotic immersion into the collective: a Dionysian act with a mixture of Apollonian ingredients, charged with masculine myths. ( Dorion Weickmann,
Süddeutsche Zeitung, March 19, 2018)
The CocoonDance Company creates an intense kinaesthetic event - just alone through the confined space - that vibrates between the dancers and the audience. (Anna Wieczorek, tanznetz.de, 3/18/2018)
MOMENTUM is a high-energy, rousing performance. (Honke Rambow, ruhrbarone.de, 16.03.2018)
- OTHERS
... a virtuoso etude about movement and how movement is perceived using intelligence and sensuality to play with the complex relationship between dancer and spectator. Although the three dancers are undertaking a physically demanding high-performance program while the audience remains in a basically passive state, both parties are nevertheless actors. (Bernhard Hartmann, General-Anzeiger, Bonn, 09.04.2016)
The male trio in MOMENTUM seems to be ancient and eternally new … and that is the ingenuity and the very contemporary quality in MOMENTUM. It is both the desire to be completely absorbed within the moment, the heavy beat, the dance, the crowd, and even the horror, the stimulus, the addiction, the pushing, the affirmation. Don’t think. Just keep going and going and going! (Melanie Suchy, tanzwebkoeln, 07.04.2016)
CocoonDance with a strong MOMENTUM. … a remarkable work about the desire for oneness … . (Melanie Suchy, Kölner Stadtanzeiger, 12.04.2016)
The three dancers are sometimes bodies, sometimes space. They are flooding and floating in all directions. (Heinz-Dieter Terschüren, Bonner Rundschau, 16.04.2016)
… three dancers devote themselves until exhaustion completely to the driving music. … they are falling down and rocketing up again, bobbing and jumping, physically wearing themselves out and creating through their continuous flow of movement a sombre, but also infectious energy in the room. (Elisabeth Nehring, WDR3, Mosaik, 03.05.2017)
MOMENTUM demands everything from its dancers, moment by moment, and always more and more. The dance piece … creates a strange maelstrom, like a good action movie, meaning a real spectacle. (Klas Libuda, Rheinische Post, 05.05.2017)
MOMENTUM, the brilliant production of Bonn’s CocoonDance Company that shows to what sensual surprises today’s modern dance is capable of. (Thomas Linden, CHOICES, 26.05.2017)
Everything in this choreography is leading to an increasing energy. ... Any improvisational training can grow into such actions. With Cocoon, of course, the whole gains a significant dimension. There is hardly any company in Germany which creates with their productions a comparable aesthetic density. (Thomas Linden, Kölnische Rundschau, 27.06.2017)
The increasing ecstatic exhaustion of the dancers creates the so-called moment in the space – less guided by thoughts, but more an instinctive effect. (Dora Cohnen, CHOICES, 28.06.2017)
Pure adrenaline. Pure sensuality. … The audience couldn't resist the impulse of getting up from the floor and, in a complicity that needs no words, moving to the music compass that possesses the dancers. It's a possession in the strict sense of the word: a conquer of the beat over the reason, and its explosion in the form. (Nina Blau, www.sotobosque.uy, 18.10.2017)
In MOMENTUM, every moment is energy-sapping celebrated – this appears in its physical intensity in some extent bizarre, but also almost genuine. (Kira von der Brelie, Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung, 27.02.2018)
When the sound in the room connects with the heartbeat; when the view of the swinging dancers changes the own body tension; when the virtuoso dance rises from the pelvis as the centre from the floor into the air and carrying away the audience. That creates a resonance which oscillates further into a sensual experience. (Nora Abdel Rahman, Mannheimer Morgen, 29.05.2018)
The audience was enthralled enthused and gave a long and rousing applause after an intense, exhausting development act which reenacted the movement of the human to the upright walk, yes, to the dance. The result were intoxicating images which will stay in the audience's mind for a long time. (Michael S. Zerban, original sound, culture magazine, www.o-ton.online, 20.07.2018)
... after this forty-minute frenzy, we are wide awake instead of tired. The maelstrom, sparked by the music and dance, makes us become one with the music and the movement. (Dietmar Zimmermann, www.theaterpur.net, 21.07.2018)
MOMENTUM is a great and unconventional piece which opens up new spaces of thought and movement, as is typical for the experimental productions of Rafaële Giovanola and dramaturge Rainald Endraß, the founders of the Bonn Cocoondance Company. And thus creating a special connection between the dancers and the audience. The spectators - and not just those sitting at the edge of the stage - were increasingly drawn into the choreography, captivated by the three dancers, who enthralled the audience with their irrepressible energy and artistic ability. (Yvonne Thyen, Westfalen-Blatt / Bielefeld, 27.07.2019)