3 men running

Time is the material. Three dancers between 30 and 50 from different cultural and geographic contexts are joined together by a strong, existential common experience: each of their fathers recently passed away. This choreography by the sons – archeologists of past and future – delves into the before and after as well as the mundane and extraordinary while searching for resonances, effects and consequences.

Real objects from the respective father’s belongings individualize the great equalizer, give each story meaning and protect subjective feelings like an anchor in the currents of time. Given their fathers’ common love of gardening, the three dancers construct a space within space using simple elements of artificial turf, surfaces with exact and identical proportions that conjure up life histories and simultaneously create interior and exterior dimensions. Video fragments, at once real evidence and pure assertions of a lived life, seem to document similarities between fathers and sons… or is it distance and difference?

The choreography, objects and video create an emotional terrain that demands an audience to take a trip into their own memories and experiences with the knowledge of finite existence and the inescapability of loss. However, a broad poetic landscape enriches the singular event of death and mourning with the experience of a universal commonality. The dancer-fathers, father-dancers are diffused in the large image with their narratives and become personally interchangeable: examples and codes of universal truth.

Production: Tanzcompagnie Rubato/Berlin co-produced by Taliesin Arts Centre/Swansea, funded by the Fonds Darstellende Künste e.V. and the City of Berlin - Department for Cultural Affairs and Sherman Cymru/Cardiff.