Come as you are # Teil 2

COME AS YOU ARE
#Teil 2

Berlin 2021/ DOCK11 theater / 65 min

What does time do to our dreams, needs, losses? Which chapters are rewritten, continued, which are erased? "Come as you are # part 2" is the continuation of an ongoing research on the cultural adaptation of Syrian dancers in the German dance performance landscape, five years after their arrival.

In the summer of 2017, the Israeli choreographer Nir de Volff realized the performance "Come as you are # Berlin" together with three dancers who had fled Syria. A fundamentally different style of dance, the repertoire of movements they had brought with them from Syria, became visible, as did their first tentative steps to approach the grammar of the Berlin dance scene.

Five years after the arrival of the refugees in Germany and three years after the departure into a Berlin, a European artist's life, new, no less complicated questions arise in "Come as you are # part 2". Groping and searching have become experience and reflection, also in artistic action.

Can the dancers erase the history of their bodies that they brought with them and start anew, build a new identity to integrate themselves? Do they want to? Or do they possibly discover a stronger connection to the origins of their identity, their heritage? How does their distance from the styles danced in their homeland, with fundamental cultural differences, determine their position as performers within the diverse, complex European-Berlin society? Do they still consider themselves, five years after their arrival in Germany, as refugees? Does our society still view them diffusely as refugees or is the perception of an individual, self-efficacious person emerging? Are they themselves beginning to feel like German artists or does their definition of identity continue to be Syrian? Is there a sense of belonging to the new country?

"Come as you are # Teil 2" is another intermediate step. Nir de Volff's choreography gives space and shape to his dancers' inner struggle between identities and realities, the struggle for their selves. What result this can have, both for the artists and for the audience, must and should remain open. In any case, however, "Come as you are" is a deeply human promise.

Concept, direction und Choreography: Nir de Volff
From and with : Medhat Aldaabal, Mouafak Aldoabl, als Gast Haidar Darvish (The Darvish)
Music: Mathieu Poterie
Costume and Stage: Darwin Stapel
Assistant costume and stage: Alfie Mor & Sophie Schling
Light design: Asier Solana Arce
Production management: Till Rothmund & Jill Emerson
Press: k3 berlin
Fotos: Bernhard Musil

A production of Nir de Volff / TOTAL BRUTAL With the support of Berliner Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa, Fonds DAKU - Take part and Dock11 theater Berlin.