Imani Rameses
First Person Plural
There has been a breach in the contract of being. First Person Plural seeks to restore it or erase it altogether. In her ‘five-person solo’, scientist/artist Imani Rameses searches for herself and shatters into many.
What happens when you look at yourself in the mirror long enough? In First Person Plural, Imani Rameses explores this question at the intersection of African divination and psychoanalysis. Chaotic, curious, open and neurotic: Five performers and their performances are being held in the same body, trapped and transformed by the enclosure around them. Five solos – or just one performed by five dancers – shatter to pieces and are being reassembled over the course of the show. They explore the hard-to-grasp nature of the self not conceptually but as embodied practice: Each of them is so different that the living body becomes the only formal limitation expressing the self. First Person Plural is the first piece in a trilogy. It places Imani Rameses’s many personalities and the soundscapes of cello, electronic music and voice performed live by Marleen Moharitsch in the same environment. The audience is invited to participate in this attempted erasure of the many binding contexts of a faulty and maddeningly iterative human reality. How can the self survive the splitting caused by self-expression? Maybe, Imani Rameses’s answer will be to disappear altogether.
Imani Rameses is a cognitive scientist, choreographer, dancer, teacher and life-long learner. She concerns herself with the phenomenology of silence as it is created at the intersections of cognitive (emotional) psychology, participatory performance practices and African alchemy. Imani Rameses’s work has been shown by ImPulsTanz, Tanzquartier Wien, the Wiener Festwochen, the University of Applied Art Vienna, brut Wien, Digital Arts & Science DAS-Zürich and the Society for Artistic Research (SAR). Her research has been presented at Harvard University, the Zurich University, the Center for Phenomenology at the University of Johannesburg and international conferences, festivals and symposiums.
Teresa Awa works as an editor and translator at Viennese publisher Passagen Verlag. She studied political science and philosophy in Bremen and Paris. Informed by deconstructivist philosophy and her practice as a dancer, she explores matters of situated epistemologies from a feminist and a decolonial perspective. She shares her work in lectures and workshops at the Floating University Berlin and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, among other places.
Cat Jimenez is a choreographer and a dancer. Her work moves between theatre, club culture and dance battles. Inspired by street dance styles such as krump, waving and house, she concerns herself with topics like grief, transformation and embodied memory. Her performances create an intimate, immersive atmosphere that invites audiences to a raw, physical dialogue. Cat Jimenez has shown her work at festivals such as Ars Electronica and ImPulsTanz and collaborated with various artists from the fields of dance, music and visual art. Her background in both freestyle and stage performance is shaping her practice of continued exchange between structured composition and the unpredictability of immediate movement.
Marleen Moharitsch is an artist concerned mostly with music and sound. In 2016, she graduated from her studies of multimedia art in Salzburg. Since then, she has undertaken projects as a solo artist, focusing on cello, live looping, singing, synthesizer, drum computers and DAW. In the field of contemporary circus, Marleen Mohartisch played a critical role in designing the music and sound support for the performance Fallhöhe.
Jared Robinson is a poet, critic and teacher from Indianapolis, USA. He submitted his doctoral thesis entitled To Save My Own Life: Antebellum Autobiography and the Figures for Black Ontology at the University of California, Berkeley. Jared Robinson’s academic research focuses on the intersections of African American literature and art practice and the philosophy of Western Enlightenment. His studies of Black life in literature have informed a comprehensive creative practice that includes essays, poems and short stories.
Mariama Sow is an artist, researcher and costume designer, whose work focuses on the political potential of clothing and performance in the context of empowerment and representation. She acquired her bachelor’s degree in fashion design at the Kunsthochschule Weißensee in Berlin with a focus on Black diasporic clothing culture in Germany. Currently, Mariama Sow is attending a master’s course in critical studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Vienna is also where she is working on a collective film and research project: A Black Fairy Tale, is part of the femBlack performance collective in Berlin and conducts research on textile connections in the context of a project entitled fabricating adjacency. As a costume designer, she co-operates with Black choreographers and directors in Germany, e.g. at Ballhaus Naunynstraße, Theater an der Parkaue, Theater Oberhausen, Schauspielhaus Graz, Deutsches Theater Berlin, Residenztheater Munich and most recently Burgtheater Wien.
Abiona Esther Ojo concluded her studies in sculpting and spatial strategies at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in 2020. While her work is displayed by and in a variety of media such as photography and textile art, her inspiration is often autobiographical. By dealing with her own embodied history, she combines her personal experience with more comprehensive, societally relevant themes. She received the Kunsthalle Wien Prize for her diploma thesis entitled There is magic in every strand, a series of sculptures that invite people to reimagine ideas on connectedness, intimacy and the individual.
Sheri Avraham is an artist, curator and theatre-maker. In her work, she reflects the contemporary forms of art production and offers new dimensions of interaction within artistic, social and political institutions. Her trans-disciplinary practice is aimed at creating new models of expression, production and shared life structures. Sheri Avraham is a co-founder of D/Arts, Project Office for Diversity and Urban Dialogue, a board member of the Visual Arts Interest Group and pursues the realisation of fair pay for artists together with the Tiroler Künstler*Innenschaft.
Lukas Kötz designs and develops site-specific pieces for theatre and the public space. Following his studies in set design at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, his artistic interest began to extend beyond the delineations of the stage. Questioning the relationship between ‘behind the stage’ and ‘on stage’, between those watching and those being watched, by changes of perspective and position, Lukas Kötz has been creating spaces that can be experienced and changed together. His work has been shown, among others, by Tanzquartier Wien, Volksbühne Berlin, ImPulsTanz and the Stralli theatre festival in Kosovo.
Márton Zalka is a multi-disciplinary designer and visual researcher from Budapest who currently lives in Vienna. Márton Zalka designed and built installations, objects and furniture for the Hungarian House of Photography, the festivals SANTSAT and Kolorádó, Improper Walls, Question Me & Answer (QMA). Inspired by the cultural heritage of material consciousness and bricolage culture, which developed during Hungary’s socialist period, he believes in the democratisation of technology and in tools paving the way for a personal future.
Yasemin Duru (they/them) is a multi-cultural, multi-disciplinary artist with a bachelor’s degree in visual art and visual communication design from Istanbul’s Sabancı University. They are currently studying digital art at the University of Applied Art Vienna. Yasemin Duru has worked multiple times as a lighting designer in collaboration with ImPulsTanz, the Transart festival, brut Wien, the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Odeon, Kulturhaus Brotfabrik and other local and international venues.
Credits
Concept & choreography Imani Rameses Assistance Teresa Awa Co-movement research Cat Jimenez Sound design Marleen Moharitsch Dramaturgy Jared Robinson Costume design Mariama Sow Textile design Abiona Esther Ojo Production Sheri Avraham Set design Lukas Kötz & Márton Zalka Lighting design Yasemin Duru
Thanks toHuggy Bears Mentoring Program, Angewandte Performance Lab and Celestial Space
A co-production of Plexus – Kulturverein für Kunst, Bildung und Neurowissenschaften Wien and imagetanz 2025 / brut Wien
Funded by the City of Vienna’s Department of Cultural Affairs (MA 7)
Dates & Tickets
studio brut
Zieglergasse 25, 1070 Wien
not accessible
Info
The performance on Fri, 21 March will be followed by an artist talk.
Content Notes
The performance uses strobe lighting effects.
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