Interdisciplinary collaboration for the academy for theatre and digitality Dortmund with digital artists Flor de Fuego and Naoto Hieda

Thanks to a Time Window festival, Nahumury met two digital performance artists. Argentinian artist Flor de Fuego and Japanese artist Naoto Hieda.

They were interested in collaborating with Annique Nahumury and invited her to come to Dortmund Theatre for Digitallity to take part in a residency.  

In this residency they experimented with digital art, performance and costumes. The outcomes were inspiring and aesthetically pleasing; from this they discovered new ways of combining the different disciplines into one coherent art work. 

They worked with digital 2d material which became 3d in a black box with scenography and costumes. Working with a 380 degrees camera, they could create 3d projections on 3d costumes and props. Because of the projections, sometimes the costumes started to become 2d from certain angles. With this the three artists were playing while they were moving around the objects and themselves. This together formed interesting visual multi dimensional compositions.

Photography: Annique Nahumury

Choreographer Marijke de Vos, Poet Daan Doesborgh and musician Bruno Ferro Xavier  researched the chaotic, exhausting and unhealthy work ethics/ circumstances of freelancers in the cultural sector. 

They came to the conclusion that this piece is balancing somewhere between a sincere complaint as well as a frustrated love declaration to the life of an artist. 

For this piece Annique was asked to take care of both costumes and scenography. This is something which she really likes as well. In this way she was able to create a coherent image in which costumes and set would visually and aesthetically be more alike.   

Also things were approached differently costume-wise. Because of the “faded glory”, which resonated from the story/concept, this had to reflect on the visual image as well, Nahumury chose to get second hand suits from the nineties and eighties for Daan, Bruno and Marijke. The overall idea was to create an image of a decayed office situation.  

When Bianca enters the office room with a totally ridiculous costume, almost clownish, the intern is cleaning the floor and the kitchen.  Soon their “boss” steps into the room and gives Bianca a look. Bianca immediately takes it off and soon she ends up with the most boring but classical rehearsal clothes for contemporary dance:  jogging pants and a simple top. With this she refers to different layers of how people hierarchically relate to one another in this workfield. Not only on choreographer versus dancer level but also between costume designers and directors, choreographers, dramaturgs etcetera. And people with a permanent contract versus freelancers or even interns and their peers is something reflected in this piece.   

The intern is first a nerdy, eighties office clerk looking wall flower and on the opposite quirky, young and fresh. Therefore Annique Nahumury chose her to wear this which also really fits the scene colorwise. Later when she steps up, she wears a black and tough harness and pants. She is sympathizing with the dancer but she is also showing that she is also a fierce artist who takes over and deserves to get credit for that. 

Important to know is that there were several interns for this role both male and female. Therefore Nahumury chose for a more gender neutral approach however this also a style Terrorkittens is known for. 

Premiered on 28th October 2022 

Photography: Mihai Gui