What has this ensemble toiled in the past few weeks!

At the end of October the three-part "Zeitgeist Dance" with Forsythe's "Quintet", a new piece by Marco Goecke and a short one by company director Jacopo Godani.

A few days ago “Hollow Bones”, about an hour from Godani.

And now the Dresden Frankfurt Dance Company has number three in the premiere series in the Bockenheimer Depot, “When The Dust Settles”.

Choreography again Godani, in a first collaboration with the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra.

Eva-Maria Magel

Head of culture editor Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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And, what can you say, when the dust clears, as the title suggests in allusion to the pandemic, then in the Bockenheimer depot there is a golden sheen, warm, dimmed light and euphoria. Even the movements are flowing, harmonious, a flow that you don't see so often in Godani's choreographies. At the beginning of the hour-long evening he stands in the penumbra at the edge of one of the three spectator stands around the dance floor and watches how his 14 dancers interact with the orchestra. And that's what they do - and the dancers wrapped in glitter fabric and the musicians dressed in black work extremely well. With one hand gently on their shoulder or back, the dancers lead some soloists into the middle at the beginning, in order to premier Johannes Sistermann's “OrchesterTraub” as the first piece.Together on the shiny gold dance floor that Godani had installed in the depot this time. Its reflection, the dimmed lights and the reflections in the beams make the Bockenheimer Depot the third actor in this staging. Otherwise nothing is needed this time, no props, no videos, no texts or singing, not even grass or a dog on the dance floor.

Nature whispers in the form of a gorilla

All of this had happened on “Hollow Bones”, a track that was streamed in a digital pre-version in lockdown and that Godani then expanded.

It didn't do him any good.

Because as if all end-time, nature and futurism fantasies hatched in the Corona phase, which Godani has always been haunted by drawing and choreography, somehow collapsed, “Hollow Bones” mixes the interest in science and the environment in the form of a gorilla who whispers to a video , It would be better if we would all protect nature, with all sorts of things that Godani and apparently also the dancers, who read out texts themselves, suppress.

Apart from the pandemic and the concern for Mother Earth, this is apparently mainly the stupidity of the people.

The sound that 48Nord composed on behalf of Siegfried Rössert after the death of Siegfried Rössert a year ago, Ulrich Müller is now going on on his own, it is pure service for too many loose threads, too much desire and little joke.

The usual hypermovement and twisting of the limbs and the barking of the dog accompanying what Godani understands as dance research.

So there’s something going on on “Hollow Bones”, making sure that nothing at all gets stuck in the end.

But what the audience, a completely different compared to the dance evenings earlier in the depot, apparently inspires.

The orchestra is also staged

With “When The Dust Settles” it is positively the other way round. No big theorem, no “research” on display. Just space, movement, music. Lucas Vis conducts the orchestra, which is located on the entrance side of the depot, and Godani has staged the orchestra, for example in Giacinto Scelsi's “Mantram”, a solo for double bass. Scelsi, like Godani from La Spezia, also plays a major role with the “Riti” in the program, which consists of nine pieces of music, from Busoni to Pärt. It is a friendly invitation to deal with younger orchestral works, to which dance gives just as friendly impulses in mostly smaller formations.

They all tie Godani's typical movement vocabulary into something pleasantly flowing, less aggressive and more communal.

Some elements, such as fluttering or raising the arms in a rectangular shape, draw a red thread through the dance, which one likes to watch in this compact lesson.

The orchestra and dancers perform Steve Reich's “Clapping Music” as bouncers - the huge applause for both can simply result in this.

Further performances of “When The Dust Settles” November 13th and November 23rd to 27th at 8 pm;

"Hollow Bones" November 17th to 20th.