In the organizer's words:

To understand SoftMachine: The Return, you first have to travel into a Timemachine and back ten years: SoftMachine is a living archive of contemporary Asia - an assemblage of bodies, stories and movements. Choy Ka Fai, a choreographer from Singapore, explored the continent's choreographic landscape in a long-term project. As a fellow traveler and friend, he combines documentation, encounters and dance by four choreographers to create a poetic reflection on time and movement.

Ten years later, with SoftMachine: The Return, he now curates the shared desire to grow old together - to repeat oneself with small deviations and to reopen earlier questions. The body becomes a site of knowledge: dance is not a metaphor, but itself a form of thought - an embodied practice of navigating and surviving life under power.

Two of the four works can be seen in Hanover: The Gonzo Prophecy by Yuya Tsukahara / contact Gonzo (Japan) and Rendezvous with the Ancestors by Rianto (Indonesia).

The Gonzo Prophecy is a bold attempt to bring Yuya Tsukahara to life as a "metahuman" using technological means. Due to the challenges of balancing work, family and private life, Yuya himself will not be traveling to Hanover; Choy Ka Fai will be on stage in his place. As an experiment in dance notation, film documentation and live action, this performance is both a biographical survey and an act of digital reinvention - a project that questions the boundaries of dance and interpretation, of absence and archiving.

Rendezvous with the Ancestors is an intimate portrait. In his dances, Rianto deals with the search for love, the confrontation with gender norms and the meaning of tradition in contemporary Indonesia. He combines elements of various traditional Javanese dance forms in his movement language and has specialized in particular in Lengger , a folk dance from the Banyumas region in Central Java, in which male dancers embody female roles. This traditional yet subversive art form questions the construction of body and gender. Through Rianto's practice, Lengger is reinterpreted - as an expression of queerness, cultural heritage and embodied archive.

Further information and tickets at www.realdance.de

Price information:

20€ (reduced 10€)