Soft Offer is a full evening solo performance about diverse bodies in performative settings. Based on the personal experience of a physical, emotional and mental transformation of a former highly disciplined dance body into a vulnerable and unavailable corporeality, the performance investigates on cultural issues of mindset in the way we see and look at diverse bodies against the horizon of normative body images on productivity, achievement, creativity, sexiness – in short: constructions of performance.
The question of how to deal with exclusionary structures as a disabled artist is closely linked to all kinds of ambivalent self-constructions. In order to keep up representing a valuable and productive part of a society, that is still misunderstanding the idea of inclusion, it is difficult to calm down and to not represent one of the two stereotypes: warrior or victim.
To create art as a self-evident fact means to find comfort and confidence in the mode and art of unavailability. As a possible technique to face this process, the performance offers a body, that developed an autoimmune issue and does not want to fight against itself, a body that resists the the glorification of self-exploitation by surrendering to the unpredictability and soften where it meets itself and others with hardness. This is a SOFT OFFER.
We all tend to glorify overwork, stress and busy. So the disabled dancers question of how to find comfort and confidence in the mode of unavailability also is a cultural one and maybe one of the key questions in terms of emancipate diversity as to be seen, felt and thought as nothing else than the equality of differences.
SOFT OFFER has premiered in January 2019 at Sophiensaele, Tanztage Berlin.
CONZEPT, CHOREOGRAPHY, PERFORMANCE: Angela Alves SOUNDDESIGN: Nick Mavridis DRAMATURGICAL COUNSELING: Alexandra Hennig A production by Angela Alves and SOPHIENSÆLE. Supported by mog61 Miteinander ohne Grenzen e.V. und Tonsturm.
