Crisis of Comfort / Songs for friends: a vinyl

ENG

Program May 26th

Crisis of Comfort 
Gaja Caruso

What is the comfort that we search for within ourselves and the others? What is the meaning of love and intimacy in the specificity of contemporary era? To sleep next to someone is the most intimate act. Two dancers fall asleep. Following the dramaturgy of their sleep cycles, we see their conscious and subconscious minds seek comfort through dance. Set to a musical composition made out of vibrations and intrusive thoughts.

Songs for friends: a vinyl 
Ashley Ho & Domenik Naue

Here is an album we have made for you. This is a record of loss, and also of growing up – which is almost the same thing. As the record plays from outside-in, the rings of trees are growing from inside-out. Time is spiralling and we skip rope across it. Welcome to this living room. Here, memories dismantle, marred by glitches; violence and intimacies yield to each other with tenderness. Pull, push, pull. In the emergent speculative realities, we navigate dissociation and change. This is the place where we created ourselves. Come on in. All is as constructed as it is real.

Songs for friends: a vinyl developed out of the physicality of rope-skipping, a long afternoon of reminiscence, and a co-reading of Hermann Hesse’s Kinderseele and Demian (two novels that delve into a child’s experiences of guilt and shame, of light and shadow). Domenik and Ashley grew up on opposite ends of the world. In this transmedial performance, they have built a shared world out of fractured memories that are charged with violence and intimacy. Each element – choreography, text, scenography, and sound – has been crafted by them, by hand. By placing separate memories into the

Same space, they activate speculative realities in which they navigate hurt, dissociation and change, no longer alone but together. The performance offers a personal, visceral, and sometimes puzzling experience that invites spectators to connect through their own memories.

About Gaja Caruso
Gaja Caruso is a dancer, dance teacher and theater maker. She was born and raised in the forests of Slovenia, spent several years in Belgium and Hungary, and finally found her place in Groningen. Here she creates new performances and teaches her own, unique interpretation of movement: BodyLab. She is part of the Station Noord program and is supported by partners Club Guy & Roni and Grand Theatre.

About Ashley Ho & Domenik Naue
Ashley Ho & Domenik Naue are a collection of limbs and hearts. They create transmedial performative encounters, playing across dance, poetry, music, and scenographic experiments. They believe in performance as a social practice - a political, intimate process of transforming and being transformed. More than a consistent focus on specific thematics, their works propose a way being with the world, that confronts harshness through vulnerability and playfulness. The collaboration between Ashley and Domenik has been nurtured by friendship, as well as support from institutions such as Dansateliers, workspacebrussels, Over het IJ, De Nieuwe Oost, CAMPO, and Dance Nucleus. Their work has been presented in festivals such as Moving Futures, FAT Leiden, Dansand, Offspring (SPRING Utrecht), and con·tact Contemporary Dance Festival. They graduated from the Dancer/Maker Bachelor’s programme at ArtEZ University of the Arts in 2022, and are currently working between the Netherlands, Belgium, and Singapore. www.ashleyhodomeniknaue.com