| Ten years after the foundation of her dance company cie.toula limnaios, chorographer, interpreter and dancer Toula Limnaios celebrates this event in the form of a three-week jubilee program. She shows pieces from several periods ranging in style from solo to quintet. This wouldn’t seem to be anything of importance, but, these days, it is very extraordinary if a dance company can survive for more than ten years within the contemporary, off-theatre-scene. In 2003, Athens-born Toula Limnaios, who founded her group with composer Ralf R. Ollertz and light desinger Franco Marri in Brussels in 1996, moved to a former police gymansium to create her art. |  |
Dancing with Lamps – Tina Kesting
Ten years after the foundation of her dance company cie.toula limnaios, chorographer, interpreter and dancer Toula Limnaios celebrates this event in the form of a three-week jubilee program. She shows pieces from several periods ranging in style from solo to quintet. This wouldn’t seem to be anything of importance, but, these days, it is very extraordinary if a dance company can survive for more than ten years within the contemporary, off-theatre-scene.
In 2003, Athens-born Toula Limnaios, who founded her group with composer Ralf R. Ollertz and light desinger Franco Marri in Brussels in 1996, moved to a former police gymansium to create her art. This space creates a special atmosphere for her performances. Old, already half-vanished sports emblems hang on the walls here, painted circles and lines lie on the wooden floors, reminding us of the early function of the brick hall, where sportive officers used to break a sweat. The police station is still in use and, from time to time, monotone sirens chime in to support the shows on stage at the Halle Tanzbühne (Berlin).
Limnaios’ performances are not simple dance shows, however. Rather, they are art performances—interplays of expressive movement, extraordinary light and experimental music in which body, color and sound melt into each other.
The choreographer breaks down the frontiers between the genres of dance, music, video and light design, while also employing these components as equal elements in her performances. Her company is able to create an atmosphere of imagination and reality in a poetic and sensitive way that also invites the spectator to dive into this inner world of mood and feeling for themselves.
The series of the jubilee program starts with Limnaios’ show “Nowhere. I Will Be There, By Not Being There” from 2001, which is the first part of the Beckett triology and for which she won the Meeting Neuer Tanz Award. This piece has been so successful that it was also made into to a TV feature. It was inspired by Samuel Beckett’s Texts for Nothing of 1955, written in the form of a diary and monologue of a multiple personality not in harmony with himself or his surroundings, and who is reflecting on his living situation. Five professional dancers portray different facets of this personality in the piece while exploring the tension between body and soul, mind and mood, movement and silence.
Limnaios’ motivation is to underline how little each of us knows about ourself and our own soul. The performers go deep into the relationship between society and the individual, dream and memory, space and time, and their way is shaped and influenced by happenings from the past, by obscurities and by future fates. The focus lies on the differences in the here and now, elsewhere and nowhere. The piece creates an abstract daydream that is clear and confusing at the same time. “Thoughts follow one after another, like a river, dragging you in its current,” Limnaios says, making clear why she is called the poet of dance.
In 2001, the Ballet International Press called this show “a piece with almost classical balance and an eminent quality of dance.” The publication also explained that “Limnaios has confidently managed to orchestrate the shift, the display of individual dance capabilities, and then to re-savor the dynamics of the group and let figurative scenes dissolve into abstract severity or touching, intimate passages.” In the same year, Berlin’s city guide, Journal Tip, wrote about this performance saying that “the exquisiteness of the troupe and their choreographer’s style, the careful composition and the strangely subdued lyricism are heightened in this piece to a rare preciosity.” With her movements, Limnaios builds up strong reflections of tempers—poetic, very touching, sometimes upsetting—and creates her own distinct and strong language.
The additional live music by Ralf R.Ollertz is cold and majestic at the same time, ranging from an archaic men’s choir to electro clusters aiming for musical nuances instead of triumph. Finally, the triumph is due to the perfectly choreographed dancers.
The second part of the program is the piece Short Stories from 2005, which has already been on stage not only in Germany, but also in Greece, Brazil and Venezuela. The piece consists of two duets and a solo, both interconnected by an intimate chamber piece in which the choreographer tells many short, but detailed personal stories.
Dancers are sitting right beside or between spectators who expect that their neighbor might be moving to the stage any minute, but that he mostly appears to be just a normal viewer as they are. Through this, the audience becomes an active part of the show. But, not only the dancers are performing. Light and sound are also dancing here—with and against each other. Similarly, the lamps hanging down from the ceiling on long cables are swinging, playing and fighting with the dancers. Human relationships are enlightened in poetic, sometimes absurd images that relate the different poles of human loneliness and togetherness, engulfment and isolation, silence and dialogue. The company’s musicians support the performance, sitting on the stage, playing the bandoneon and various other percussion instruments and creating a weird and wonderful acoustic picture.
As we already learned as little children, the best always comes at the end. The highlight of the jubilee program is the solo, Vertige, danced by Toula Limnaios herself. Vertige explores the many facets of the world of dizziness; the feeling where everything surrounding oneself is in motion, provoked by fast-shifting impressions or by physical, inner processes. Vertige means a vicious circle of impressions and moods; never-ending movements within and without yourself, having no balances, feeling lost, helpless, defeated and ruled by an outer power. Anxiety, powerlessness and tension are melting into an indefinable mass of feelings. The ground under your feet seems to lose itself in the whirling images of fights, senseless repetitions and quietness.
In this piece, dance, music, video and light are combined into a kaleidoscope of emotions and inner feelings which pull the spectator into a mood of the unexpected and the fantastic, the known and repeated experiences.
This interplay of dance, sound and video highlights the jubilee program. Three pieces in three weeks have summed up ten years. And, thus, we are already looking forward to the 20-year jubilee program years from now.
