Tanzmesse Digital Space

Choreography: Choy Ka Fai, Ligia Lewis, Joana Chicau and Jonathan Reus, Robin Jonsson

In the Tanzmesse Digital Space, created by Demodern, works by the artists Choy Ka Fai, Ligia Lewis, Joana Chicau and Jonathan Reus, and Robin Jonsson can be experienced.

Choy Ka Fai // Blue Sky Academy # 311C

Blue Sky Academy #331C_ is an online simulation of a performance with an interactive web portal of visual documentary and rendered worlds. The academy is a conceptually new school to promote Siberian Shamanism as a contemporary form of spiritual practice. It proposes a discursive space that provides new visibility to the old, supposedly irrational belief system and the alternative views of the world inherent in shamanism. The work is part of Choy Ka Fai’s ongoing series Cosmic Wander, exploring shamanic dance culture in Asia.

Ligia Lewis // deader than dead

Originally planned as a live performance, deader than dead became a film due to pandemic. Choreographer Legia Lewis began the creation of the performance with an investigation into the irony and emotional distance induced by the deadpan, a comically deployed impassive attitude. For this filmed version, the dancers are inspired by the final monologue of Macbeth and deploy a modular form in which each chapter illustrates death, stasis or emptiness. The performance is also a reflection on familiarity with tragedy in black communities, on time and its loops, on touch as both an act of care and violence – all with a good dose of humour.

Joana Chicau & Jonathan Reus // Anatomies of Intelligence

Besides two online live performances, the work Anatomies of Intelligence will be accessible as interactive, durational web-installation. It is an artistic research project led by Joana Chicau and Jonathan Reus, who work together to make connections between the formats and collections of anatomical knowledge and investigations into the “anatomy” of computational learning and prediction processes, datasets and machine learning models.