Tobias Staab

During the peak of the pandemic the curator, dramaturge, and artist Tobias Staab developed with the dancers from Ballet of Difference the video installation Trans Corporal Formations, which experiments with corporal techniques moving on the edge of consciousness. With this project Staab is searching above all for the transformative potentials of the dancing human body. Moving through different forms the body appears as a utopian location, where the difference of a binary structured sexuality dissolves precisely like the boundaries between humanness and non-humanness, between analogue reality and virtual reality.

The individual dancers appear to be isolated from one another on each one of the five screens. Togetherness, interaction, and touching are only possible in the digital realm, which in this manner becomes an essential part of the choreography. The sounds that were generated by the dancers' bodies were arranged by the Munich-based composer Benedikt Brachtel into a "musical collage of the body" and interwoven with his intense electronic composition. The special dimension of physicality is intensified on the one hand through the surreal costumes by Annika Lu Hermann and on the the other hand by using a specially developed algorithm (time warp choreography: Michael Saup) which is overwritten by an artificial intelligence. In doing so, movements and images are created that were never filmed in this way.

As a specialist in the interface between experimental electronic music, dance, installation art, and performative art, Staab has launched and curated numerous programs and festivals (Ruhrtriennale; DIVE Immersive Arts Festival; Ritournelle; Panta Rhei; Bauhaus Club 2.019: Hyper.Culture). He founded with the choreographer Richard Siegal the dance company Ballet of Difference in 2016. He has been working since 2019 as a director in the border areas of performance, dance, and film. Trans Corporal Formations makes it possible to immerse oneself in audio-visual portrayals of the dancing body – transformed through pixels and glitches (short-term disturbances), nd made audible in an immersive sound space.

After the world premiere of Trans Corporal Formations at DANCE 2021 had to be cancelled due to the pandemic, the video installation celebrated its world premiere at Theater in Bewegung in Jena, Germany, and there followed additional guest performances in Berlin and Cologne. Now the installation is finally returning to Munich.

At DANCE 2023 Angelika Meindl, Tobias Gremmler, and Thomas Mahnecke in Tracing the Negative Space and the visual artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster with her holographic illusion Hypnogirl 23 are also exploring the interweaving of dance and digitality.