Annelie Andre - SYS4 & Mirjam Sögner - LARA

SYS4

SYSTEM – an entity of connections, references and different conditions.
Do systems either provide security and structure or are they first of all limiting us?
To build up walls and borders is a way to create stability – but is there still space for freedom, sensibility, for human individuality?
The step out of a system is the first step into another one.
Are we destroying ourselves, constantly restricting our inner forces – or do we say yes to our position and defend it keenly?
The impulse for independence is continual. But the breakout is controlled.
How do we act as a part of this entity, as a brick, as a system? Vibrating, proud, calm, provocative?

Annelie Andre is a graduate of contemporary dance teaching from the Arts University of Vienna. In 2013, Annelie Andre won the Fidelio main prize with her interdisciplinary piece Schichtung (“Stratification”). Her focus lies on choreography and text work, closely connected with sound, dance and performance.

LARA

LARA, a solo dance piece, uses the pixelated movement patterns of heroes and heroines of early computer games as the basis for a scrutiny of digitally distorted physicalities. Dancer and choreographer Mirjam Sögner translates these unnatural moving qualities and visual errors of digital avatars back into her own body, thereby creating an uncanny hybrid somewhere between virtual reality, stage reality and human physicality. With her movements the artist imitates characters imitating humans, creating the impression of a physical body trapped in a digital world. While digital and physical realities keep assimilating in real life, this solo provides a physical response to our perception of the thus changing world.

Mirjam Sögner studied contemporary dance, artistic research and choreography both at the Music and Arts University of Vienna and the ArtEZ Arnhem, Netherlands. Her solo piece LARA was selected for Aerowaves Twenty 16. In 2014, she was a DanceWEB scholar, also she received the START stipend of the Austrian Federal Chancellery as well as, most recently, the dance stipend of the Berlin Senate. Her most recent work The Dancer of the Future, a duet about Isadora Duncan embedded in techno beats, opened early this year at the Sophiensæle/Berlin as part of the Dance Days.