Choreographer: Henrik Kaalund Dancer: Anne Schmidt
DreaMe is about the interaction between reality and wish-reality. In DreaMe, the dancer on stage and the audience is confronted with an excess of information, like it is typical for the media-society of today. The piece reflects the individual consequences of this information overkill, frequently leading to escapist behavior. The escape into virtual worlds seems particularly tempting, since these seem to offer the possibility to take on other identities, providing you can use them to your advantage. Where one deals with the surplus of information and is able to differentiate between real and virtual, another fails and overloads. DreaMe oscillates between these two poles. In DreaMe the audience is confronted with broken up material. The projected video and text, live and recorded words of the performer, movements and sound are rarely synchronized. The viewer is challenged to discover the relations between the exploded elements and possibly, through this, face a feeling of overload. Special attention is given the ideals of achievement and beauty, as they are dictated to us by the media. How do I deal with the rising pressure? And how large is the margin within which I can move, while still remaining true to myself?
On a projection surface on the back part of the stage, a double of the performer appears, a phantom-identity. This double represent the artificially created ideals, values and goals of the real woman on one hand and her subconscious needs on the other. Her problem is to differentiate between her real and artificial self. The stage-elements video and sound play an equally important role as the movement. They each create a course of events which is independent of the other media. For the performer, however, they are opponents in her attempt to position herself.
Dancer and choreographer Henrik Kaalund was educated at Copenhagen, Denmark, State Ballet Academy of Koln, Germany and John Cranko School in Stuttgart, Germany. He got full scholarship at Joffrey Ballet School in New York and at David Howards Studios, New York.
His work as a choreographer started in 1984 and so far he has choreographed more than 30 pieces, including dance films, documentaries and theatre pieces. As a dancer, Henrik Kaalund proved himself both in the ballet pieces and contemporary dance productions.
He is the winner of many prizes at renowned choreography competitions, such as in Burgos, Leipzig or Hannover, and at film festivals.
