works
Caroline Beach is a German based, Texas born choreographer and performance artist who is best described as a cartoon artist working with wrong mediums. She has made work for a multitude of spaces including theaters, galleries, off-spaces, the Internet, and most recently, a media storage closet. Her work is not at the intersection of anything but rather looks at practicing meaning-making in the contested space between the arbitrary and the profund, the living and the living dead. She is interested in technology as human, the politics of nonsense, and synthesis through pop logic.
Untitled Shipwrecks 8-99
Untitled Shipwrecks 8-99 is an ongoing work of speculative archiving of the living dead. A shipwreck is an irreversible event that spawns an ongoing process of decay and transformation and this collection exists only through emergent frameworks that temporarily latch onto form. The history of media here is the history of the human and is washed up on the shore of no longer relevant media. Looking at the choreography of information systems, the simultaneity of culture, and obsolescence as an accelerator stronger than progress, these shipwrecks offer a process of making and unmaking work, material, and the self.
.jpg)
A sailor* must find a temporary boat in order to navigate the precarious waters of narrative, but what resources are available to a crew this cute? A hanging garden, a negative affirmation, a curated time-travel through various melancholias.
A Sailor* can make special offers for the possible versions of reality piled at their feet, but the winds from paradise are always blowing in the wrong direction and messing up their hair. A Sailor must use razor sharp pop logic and their own dead futures if they want to stay afloat out here. Ahoi!
„Unterstützt durch das NATIONALE PERFORMANCE NETZ - STEPPING OUT, gefördert von der Beauftragten der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien im Rahmen der Initiative NEUSTART KULTUR. Hilfsprogramm Tanz.“
SONDERANGEBOT was a series of performances for a spaces that included a boat, a church, a radio show, and the internet. It took the material of an existing artistic work, SAILOR ON AISLE 5, and imprinted this work onto different surfaces. This spwaning of the material and corrosion of informations produced distinct instances in which that were embedded in each other. Supported by NPN Stepping Out, Studio DB Berlin, Hosek Contemporary Gallery, Herrfurthplatz Kirche, Monsters Believers, Cashmere Radio, and C. Rockefeller Center for the Contemporary Arts Dresden.
In collaboration with the performers Jossia Clement, Laura Morales Davila, Valerie Ebuwa, Joseph Hernandez, Christian Novopavlovski, and Steph Quinci.
Stage and Costume by Lisa Rüger and Amelie Sabbagh.
Video Art by Lucie Freynhagen.
Production and Artistic Assistance by Ana Dordevic.
Photos by Ilia Osokin and Simon Findlay.
"Sailor on Aisle 5" follows five performers on an identity parkour through the precarious waters of contemporary culture.
A sailor* can be one or many and is both a skin and a set of tools for interweaving ideas, objects, persons. Moving in and out of being, these Sailors navigate their way through various aspects of our daily existence and the commodification of the now. The Sailors find themselves in the eventuality of a supermarket in which all markets, campaigns, and histories have been evolved to the hypsperspace of the white box. They build ephemeral bridges from the personal to the hyperreal to the mythological and use dance, humor, and pop music to explore alternative futures that are embedded in the past.
In collaboration with the performers Jossia Clement, Laura Morales Davila, Valerie Ebuwa, Joseph Hernandez, and Steph Quinci. All texts performed in the piece authored by the performers themselves.
Stage and Costume Design: Amelie Sabbagh + Lisa Rüger
Video Art: Lucie Freynhagen
Film and Edit: Ian Whalen
Artistic Assistance: Ana Dordevic
Concept, Choreography, Music: Caroline Beach
A production by Caroline Beach in coproduction with TANZPAKT Dresden.
Under the patronage of the City of Dresden, Office for Culture and Monument Protection, the association Villa Wigman für TANZ and HELLERAU – European Centre for the Arts cooperate in “TANZPAKT Dresden”.
Funded by TANZPAKT Stadt-Land-Bund with the support of the German Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, the Saxon State Ministry for Science and the Arts*, and the City of Dresden.
*This measure is co-financed by tax revenue on the basis of the budget approved by the Saxon state parliament.
does sailor dream of electric dolphins?
videowork for the Technische Sammlung Ausstellung ‘Mind over Matter’ January 2021
Human thought has persistently clamoured its way to the top of its own constructed pyarmid, using bodies, both human and non-human, as conscripted interfaces in the search of new land. But what if we put thought dreamed of flatter territories, of being one in a collection of interfaces that are intrinsically enmeshed in one another? What if machines dream of us, and dreams dream of dream? Sailor is not Alice, but still, it is a wonder to sail on the dead computer waters. Here, dolphins push enigmatic buttons that create brief ripples on the ever fluctuating surface just below the ship. Ahoi. Filmed at the Technische Sammlung Dresden and the C. Rockefeller Center for the Contemporary Arts. Concept, direction, film, sound, and editing by Caroline Beach. In collaboration with the performers Christian Novopavlovski, Casey Ouzounis, Markus Stein, Augusta Vickunaite, and Lucie Freynhagen.
Sailor_Log: the third ocean
Sailor* is sailing through the precarious waters of studio work. One Sailor finds instruments important in order to build imaginary landscapes that perform basic emotions and movements, adding body to a skeleton. The other Sailor is more concerned with discovering the body of space itself, cutting off various heads and hands in order to dissolve the state. But in both cases, the image loses its body and approaches death. They find themselves in a radio station in outer space that never plays Sailor’s favorite song. Here they must find a new way, a third way, to communicate with each other in the place beyond language, beyond power. Ahoi! The third ocean offers itself. Folklore, Glitch, Pop, and the Reverse Engineered Void.
Sailor_Log: the Third Ocean was a collaboration between Caroline Beach and the artist Ernst Markus Stein. They went sailing and researching together in Ljubljana, Slovenia in a residency coordinated and made possible by En-Knap Dance Group, Hellerau Europäische Zentrum der Künste Dresden, and Tanzpakt Dresden. They were influenced by the people they met in Ljubljana, the history of the country, the architecture that they said hello to on their walk to the studio, and the way that ‘thank you’ rhymes with Koala in Slovenian. Their research has focused on finding the overlaps and distances in their respective fields, building bridges through old mediums and writing new languages that are better than compromises.
https://tanzpakt-dresden.de/residenzen/sailor-log
http://swimmer.hopto.org/enabled/index.php?id=sailor_web
Host Body Cabaret: a pop-up performance
was a Pop-up performance. Supported by the TanzNetzDresden. And the C. Rockefeller Center for the Contemporary arts. Hosted by hi-jacked bodies on the edge of biological separatism. Temporary alliances formed by giving high-fives to low frequencies. Performing body drag for an audience of poetic napkins. Wipe off your humanity and reclaim your fish spine. Fish nets are free radicals and even the orchestra is beautiful. At any given moment the threat of an outbreak of song dance or botulism looms large. Hybrid sensations seduce with a slow stripping of binary definitions. Prosthetics. Prophetics. And all that jazz.
https://www.crockefeller.org/allgemein/02-10-2019-host-body-cabaret/
AnnieQuinn
Who are we? Well, that’s up to you really. Here at AnnieQuinn, we are waiting to be filled with possibilities of you. That’s why we developed a process unlike any other in which we can get to know each other. Perhaps you are drawn to a certain ruling principle or the element of fire, or perhaps you feel at ease with one of our representative Annies or Quinns. Without comment, without searching or demanding, we can weave a profile for you that draws you first further into yourself before asking you to come to us. That’s because with each of our individually calibrated TETRAscores, we are doing more than just placing you on a spectrum. We are opening up to you a new liminal space where your ‘self’ of today can meet with your selves of tomorrow, with Annie, Quinn, and the whole cyberscape of you. Every infinitely unique contour of your algorithm projected onto the oscillating floating body that you will find through us. That’s because AnnieQuinn only asks questions, only takes you as far as you want to go: it’s self-decision that way! But if you would like to come along, AnnieQuinn can take you further than you can imagine to go, to the place where you can find itself all by itself. When you’re ready, we look forward to meeting you!
AnnieQuinn is a multi-disciplinary performance series developed by Caroline Beach and Ian Whalen. It functions as a performative start-up company with the brand strategy 'In order to use the product, you must become the product.' It looks at the ways in which hyper late-capitalism fractures and commodifies attention, bodies, and identities and blurs the lines between work and play. When caught in this dream, brushing up against the utopic can be experienced as a nightmare.
https://www.instagram.com/anniequinn_inc/
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
the sailor and the sticky
On todays episode of
1. sailor’s
2. sixteen
3. Slow
4. And steady
5. Steps
6. To secure
7. Success
8. Sweet
9.. Sugar free
10. Satisfaction
11. Spontaneous
12. Sex
13. Secular
14. Spirituality
And
15. Stoic
16. Survival
We will be speaking with one of our regular guests:
my great, final, triumph.
This Diamond Salt-Lick Future
13.
An ancient spine, if
You had only told me what
You meant, insisted:
14.
To clean a house, to
believe in murder, maybe
There where ‘I Saw It’.
15.
Was that your question
If she was as beautiful
As all the gazes
16.
Indirect, sounding
Oranges, stealing moons, and
You meant, insisted,
17.
At my own expense,
This Diamond Salt-Lick Future,
Imagined nature.
Touching on themes of posthumanism, the liminal space of mental illness, and emergent structures, This DSLF creates a mythology of the body for this point in our collective history. It looks forward to the end of stories that erase pluralities, the re-writing of wholeness, and the acceptance of fluid and partial identities that hold embodiment to be a fundamental part of the human exprerience. Also: small pink cars, long ago on shipless oceans, terrible and awesome chirality, and secret meat.
OPOTFOTF: a sensational soap opera musical
was a collaboration between the choreographers and performers Caroline Beach, Susan Schubert, and Magdalena Weniger exploring hyper-normalization, absurdity, performed songs, and melodrama.
The Beagle
The Beagle is a piece inspired by the solipsism of our overlapping lives, by the spontaneous worlds that are born and die between the hours of two and four in the morning, and by the paradox of ecstasy and hopelessness that presents itself to us at the edge of reason. It is inspired by old songs, dive bars, and the eponymous poem by Charles Bukowski.
The Beagle was supported by the Goethe Institut Bucharest and Paradise is Here. It has been shown in Dresden, Bucharest, Venice, and Kiev. Adapting to what home it finds, The Beagle can play in your favorite pub, local black-box theater, crust-punk off-space, industrial foyer or in your living room as it winds through its many possible characters, striking a humorous tone best heard by yourself.
Two Hands in the Sun
Caroline Beach + Noah Punkt
An exercise in personal branding, repetition, and carrying the weight of the world. This mantra exhausts all possibilities of rising above expectation and examines the artist's daily task of pushing the rock up through an onslaught of applications, social media, and daily routine in order to get to the top of the hill. It is two artists examining their struggles and finding a mutual point of resistance through failure, through letting the rock roll down, through taking the two hands down out of the sun.
Orangez (2 US)
Orangez (2 US) was created for the American Dance Festival as part of the International Choreographic Residency Program.
Music and Choreography: Caroline Beach
Dancers: Patricka James, Meredith Mulligan, Demetrius Williams, Zakari Jaworski, Creszenz Bergmeier,Annie Lee
foto Pierre Willscheck
foto Pierre Willscheck
foto Pierre Willscheck
enter the pony
was a site-specific performance developed as part of PARKOUR DER GEGENWART, organized by the Alte-Feuerwache Loschwitz and the C. Rockefeller Center for the Concetomporary Arts. It follows unity Shetland through the four stages of entrance: Proto-Pony, Pseudo-Pony, Party-Pony, and Post-Pony. Suffering an ontological crisis after reading Black Beauty for the thirteenth time, Unity realized that she needed a radically different approach to equestrianism: she shouldn’t be getting back on the horse every time she fell off, she should be becoming the horse/fall. Combining the intellectual rigor of third wave feminism with the practical know-how of pony grooming, Unity invites us to prance after the carrot on the stick all the way to the end, to transcend our essential selves to a more fluid, four-legged understanding of what the world could be.
Alte Feuerwache Loschwitz, foto Lucie Freynhagen
Haus_Pet
“Just an animal in a zoo,
Come look at me and I’ll look back at you,
Come try to feed me through the bars,
Tell me my polar bear friends would really like it on Mars”
Haus_Pet is an interactive performance and pop song. It was first developed in Jesse Zarritt's solo-practice class at the American Dance Festival, and later performed at the Alte Feurwache in Dresden.
Litte Darling
collaboration with Ian Whalen and the performers
is a durational performance that was presented at the Kukulida e.V. Dresden. Weaving together the story of the murder of JonBenét Ramsey and the structure of Hamlet, audience members were selected five at a time to go to the 'waiting room' in which they were examined by a doctor. Afterwards, they were asked to crawl down a ladder into a basement, where they would find themselves confronted with a lot of spilled milk, a ghost singing Britney Spears, and two strange gentlemen who had developed their own method for signing the papers. A performance that was based through hearsay, exception, and grand finale pageantry, Little Darling has no clear winners and leaves few characters left alive to tell the tale.
.jpg)
Radical Softness
in collaboration with Charles Washington
"The future is what will happen in the time after the present. Its arrival is considered inevitable due to the existence of time and the laws of physics. In the philosophy of time, presentism is the belief that only the present exists in light pink bubbles that expand and contract according to the global technology environment."
Inspired by watching a post-Trump America across an ocean, we developed this performance practice to confront the nihilism that can grow when we ask oursleves what we can do as individuals in the face of global issues that make us feel powerless. By pitting issues of existential risk next to daily trivialities, a state of necessary contradiction is created in order to confront the absurdity that governs are perception as well as our world. Performed here at Modular Space Gallery, the Greenhouse, Berlin. All artwork by Stefan Brock.
Squeeze the Lemon
Squeeze the Lemon is an interactive performance piece that asks us how to get beyond the liminal rind to the bitter juice itself. Offering both traditional and non-traditional lemons and an array of garden shed tools, this piece leaves no lemons standing and very few clean shoes.
Cocktail Napkin is a consensually spiked drink. A blend of iconography, semiotics and Really Good Costume Changes. Up with olives and with a twist of identity theft. Here on the fringe, the bad haircut is on the house . Electro-pop, Glam-Folk, and Dada all go in the blender. Fancy a tall cold drink? Cocktail napkin already drank it. Sorry. Cash only. And don’t call me baby, baby.
the current alias for the ever shifting musical pursuits of Casey Ouzounis and Caroline Beach.
photo João V. de Carvalho
