Choros, Chora, Aeon

Space Myth Trilogy 2016–2021

Where do we live?

Our art explores this question and is set in motion by it.

Landscapes peer out of images, they are unreal without being altered. Voices give accounts of characters that are ourselves, but different. They set out for deserted places, places that simultaneously move towards them. The exhibition space becomes mobile: walls tip and floors drift. In the performance dancers open themselves to intuitive powers of attraction. They follow their own senses, allow themselves to drift, but with the sharpest of clarity. Spectators become participants without doing anything. They melt into the event.

Every work is an expedition into a present which is alien to itself.

In 2016, a trilogy began to form around that alien Here: the space choreographies Choros, Chora, Aeon In the beginning, these pieces were not designed to hang together or to function as sequels. Now, however, four years after beginning the first, somewhere in the middle of the second and shortly before we embark on the last, the same motifs keep reappearing but in different versions: The earth seems to be an alien planet. A techno-natural outdoor world that moves us but which isn’t ours. Within it arises a movement of living bodies informed neither by progress nor by stagnation. A dynamic which originates from inside itself and which knows neither reason nor goals. In which bodies simultaneously separate and conjoin. Disgorge into space and assemble themselves into places.

We are here. But in what kind of Here, as what kind of We and in what way seems wide open nowadays. Our art is drawn towards that openness. Space, movement, and multitude in their contemporary incertitude are the material of our works.

Space Myths

Choros, Chora, Aeon are the names of unknown places we discover in the Here and Now of our work. Just as celestial bodies are named after mythological Greek figures, so we give mythical names to the landscapes that appear in our works.

Choros is a reference to the chorus of antiquity and designates the circle dance, the dancers and the place of dance. Choros is filled with the togetherness of movement, body, and space: Through dance, the chorus brings forth stage-like places. The oldest of these are the circular spots in sandy or grassy soil created by the steps of a circle dance. Chora is the mythical name for a space in motion. A space that is never in balance and never stationary. Out of this permanent instability the world arises. Plato calls Chora “the wetnurse of becoming”. Aeon is – alongside Chronos – antiquity’s other god of Time. Unlike its course, chronology itself, Aeon is the infinite moment, eternity. Geology today measures eras in aeons, spans of time that are beyond our perception of transience, in their virtually eternal extent at the frontiers of stillness, that is of space.

All three names evoke images of space in motion, of movements of space. These are movements of a Where? that is never simply there – but that constantly creates itself and constantly withdraws again. A space that is only created through us – through our actions, as in Choros; that is always within us – as a moving space of all creation, as in Chora; and that always operates beyond us – an eternal period, as in Aeon.

Choros, Chora, Aeon are mythical names from another time. They are alien, they resonate from a distant place. We hear them as echoes in our works. We enhance their echoes. We don’t tell stories under these names. The archaic within them explains nothing to us, neither antiquity nor the present. The mythical names in our works are like fossils from the primordial ocean, like fragments of meteorite from a far-distant impact, or the cosmic background radiation from the Big Bang. Something that is past but without history. Fallen out of time and yet still there. Something alien that is present. That is alien in its presence and which is able, for that reason – like the astronomical names for newly discovered planets, moons, solar systems – to describe something unknown, something distant and in the future.

When we hear these names – Choros, Chora, Aeon – they open up something unreal in the heart of reality, both lost in reverie and yet still connected to us. In an indeterminate, open way they resonate from a time before and after all forms of history we are familiar with. From an expanded Here without access or detours: from an Outer Space.

As mythical concepts they have always described something that is there but which defies explanation and order. In our works, they continuously give a name to the sense that the present is alien to itself.

Space Choreographies

Choros, Chora, Aeon are unfamiliar areas, an alien Here and Now, a Where? in movement. They are not the titles of plays with plot or development. In Choros, Chora, Aeon there is no process that envelops everything which happens. There is no story combining all the elements. There is no presentation.

As in a landscape, multiple things occur together and everywhere: here images are emerging, there bodies are dancing, moving through space, and over there is a voice which speaks; here a piece of the floor is rolling about, there a woman sits in the audience. Everything that happens happens in a single location: here, there, over there. It merges, is mixed with something else, stays by itself, vanishes, reappears again.

We call our works Space Choreographies.

A Space Choreography is no dramaturgical-chronological unit, it is an open whole. It arises repeatedly, simultaneously in different locations, it has several sources: videos, texts, movements, objects, audience members. Each element exists on its own, in its own present and temporality; they meet in their spatial openness towards each other: They pass each other by, cross over each other, bump into each other, operate in parallel, separate. Far from the dancing subject, their shaped forms of expression and body language offered to an audience, our Space Choreographies contain pluralistic elements which continuously display themselves and move together.

We are crafting a work that appears in different locations and in different media at the same time. All forms are independent and equal. There are always multiple sources, nothing derives from anything else: the videos don’t originate from the texts. The performance doesn’t originate from the images. The objects don’t originate from the performance. The viewing doesn’t originate from a presentation. Every element has its own source, its own temporality. The references between them, the particular way in which they hang together or are separate is the essence of each work: In Choros the elements and their traces are combined in space in a different way than in Chora, and in Aeon it will be different yet again. Not as static arrangements but as dynamics which each work produces from within itself. Every work moves differently as a whole. Each is a specific organism, just as a desert is formed in a different way from a mountain.

Landscapes are formed, they move, they are moved and influenced with no specific goal in mind. They change continuously. They drift beneath and fold over utopias and dystopias.

Our works are neither accretions of loose fragments and single strands, nor a “Gesamtkunstwerk” that we assemble, because they are ultimately not ruled by a single final shape – neither as a unity, nor as the destruction of one.

In Choros, Chora, Aeon, Space Choreographies driven by a Where without destination, a life without intention, a We without identity, it is the origins which matter. Plural origins, synchronous in different movements, temporalities, spaces, over and over the appearance and disappearance of images, voices, bodies, objects, and their connections. Nothing is predicted, nothing is projected towards an ending, everything originates from the indefinite.

Not the result of something: how it looks, what it means, to what it is linked, but the fact that it arises, at multiple times and each time in a different way, that something starts, at the same time, that it arises in multiple places, vanishes again and reappears somewhere else as new – that is the infinite present at play in Choros, Chora, Aeon – We work in the open spaces of an alien Here.

2020: Aeon | Tanznacht 2020 | Berlin

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