Performance

“The Truth about Monte Verità” is an interactive expressionist film and live dance performance that deals with the artists’ colony “Monte Verità” as a place of utopian withdrawal. The starting point is the spirit of despair, absurdity and enthusiasm depicted by Erich Maria Remarque, which prevailed in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century and which can be found in the expressionist silent film.

The piece takes formal elements from Hugo Ball’s Dadaist poetry and develops further using Rudolf von Laban’s movement theory of the eight drives. This explores modernity’s flight into nature and the tension between utopia and crisis. “The Truth about Monte Verità” is thematically embedded in the performance series “The nature of crisis” by Constanza Macras. The Baumwollspinnerei Leipzig is a predestined location for this, because it symbolizes the discrepancies of modernity between industrialization and the associated changes in society, while at the same time currently creating space for new ideas in the field of art and culture.

Constanza Macras, born in Buenos Aires / Argentina in 1970, has been living in Berlin as a dancer and choreographer since 1995. With her company Dorkypark, founded in 2003, she brings together artists from different genres and countries. Her piece “MIR – A love story” was shown at the Tanzplattform Deutschland, organized by euro-scene Leipzig 2002, in Leipzig.