TANZFONDS ERBE EXTENDED

Having worked as a choreographer since 1999, the Berlin-based artist Isabelle Schad has built a wide-ranging repertoire. In 20 years, she has created more than 40 internationally acclaimed pieces that bridge dance, performance and visual art.

When the coronavirus pandemic hit and severely restricted all artistic production, she took this as an opportunity to pause and take stock of what she had created so far, also reflecting on her choreographic legacy. With the help of a grant from TANZPAKT RECONNECT she developed a concept for an online archive that would document her oeuvre in a systematic way and thus keep it alive.

The “Living Archive” brings existing material into the present by examining, rearranging and contextualising it. Transformed in this way, the works gain a new, timeless kind of temporality, which manifests in different formats:

“Working together” is dedicated to Isabelle Schad’s longstanding collaboration with the visual artist and philosopher Laurent Goldring. By presenting selected video loops and photographs from their joint oeuvre, they create a narrative of parallel and transversal working practices.

For the publication “A Room Full of Particles. A Living Archive for Isabelle Schad”, the choreographer sent out invitations to people who had contributed to her work in some way or another, asking them to reflect on her artistic practice from their own point of view. The responses she received included videos, audio tapes, texts, poems, letters, drawings and photos. The dramaturg Elena Basteri collected these ‘traces’ and arranged them in an organic, intuitive way to create a heterogeneous, living archive.

The publication is free of charge and can be downloaded here.