RAIMUND HOGHE
QUARTET
26 Oct, 7 pm | City Hall Boris Hristov

In QUARTET the German choreographer, playwright and dancer Raimund Hoghe builds a magical world, combining pathos and longing, minimalism and ritualism, precision of detail with the opulence of simplicity. The clean set is filled predominantly with the beauty of music, and the gestures of the dancers, whose movements are brimming with pathos and longing. Hoghe’s celebration of reduction and ritualization are intoxicating and leaving lasting impressions.
Raimund Hoghe has been a dramaturg for Pina Bausch for ten years until 1990 and since then has been developing his own theatre work.

Choregraphy and conception: Raimund Hoghe
Constructive Assistant: Luca Giakomo Schulte
Performers: Ornella Balestra, Marion Ballester, Emmanuel Eggermont, Takashi Ueno and others
Music: Franz Schubert, Edvard Grieg, Georg Friedrich Handel, Johann Sebastian Bach, Irving Berlin, Charles Aznavour and others.
Lighting Effects: Raimund Hoghe, Johannes Sundrup
Sounds Designer: Paskal Gerke
Manager: Judith Jaeger
Duration: 2 h. 37 min.

About the show:

Small balls bounce and roll all over the stage. The choreographer walks around in his black high heels and, with an idle toss, throws the balls to the sound of Franz Schubert’s Death and the Maiden string quartet. Slowly, with easy, gentle and almost ritualistic movement, the other performers also appear on stage, each of them rather lost in their own private world, which is at the same time linked with the rest by an invisible thread. Raimund Hoghe allows his shows to take the time and space to prolong the situation, movement, and experience that is true to its inner rhythm. Detail is of extreme importance; each step and each gesture have been pedantically performed by the dancers, who are entirely absorbed in what they are doing. The choreography follows fixed sequences of steps and gestures, which should not be broken, or else the movements will lose their magical power. It looks as if Hoghe is drawing geometrical shapes on the floor. Time and space are so constructed that it seems the world would lose its coherence if these shapes were destroyed. Perhaps the world has already been destroyed and Raimund Hoghe wants to create a new order with his choreographies.

“In all of his pieces, Raimund Hoghe acts as a master of ceremonies,” writes one of his critics, Gerald Siegmund. QUARTET gathers all of Hoghe’s favorite dancers together. The show, which combines the precision of detail and the richness of simplicity, is full of pathos and longing, and the choreographer has once again approached his work with minimalism and rituality. The beauty of music intoxicates, while the dance leaves its marks on the bodies and souls of everyone sharing in the experience.
Raimund Hoghe's Tanztheater manages to be explicitly political without neglecting form. The ritual severity of Japanese theatre combines with American performance art, German expressionism and his own interest in human feelings and socio-political states to create his minimalist pieces. Short anecdotal texts highlight the contradictions of the time and the big, little yearnings that keep people going. The scenes' action is always presented in abstraction while the emotion is contained only in popular songs, carefully selected by Hoghe according to subject-matter and period. He formulates his memories so that the historic events are called to mind through subjective and purely private moments. His body, that due to his hump does not correspond with society's norm, holds a place for us all and our personal memories. He opens up spaces between things, words and songs for personal reminiscences and affective moments. They are moments for reflection but also for laughter.
- Gerald Siegmund

About the company:
RAIMUND HOGHE was born in 1949, in Wuppertal, Germany. The choreographer began his career as a journalist and writer of portraits. His portraits were subsequently published in a number of books. From 1980 to 1990, he worked as a playwright for the Pina Bausch Tanztheater in Wuppertal. This experience served as the material for two more books. Since 1989, Hoghe has been working on his own theatrical productions, collaborating with various artists and dancers. In 1992, he began a close collaboration with the artist Luca Giacomo Schulte, who is still his artistic collaborator. In 1994, Hoghe produced his first solo project for himself Meinwärts, which, together with Chambre séparée (1997) and Another Dream (2000), forms a trilogy on the 20th Century. Hoghe has also worked on various TV projects. His books have been translated into many languages, while his pieces have been performed across Europe, the Americas, Asia and Australia. He has received many awards such as: Deutscher Produzentenpreis für Choreografie 2001, French Prix de la Critique 2006 in the category Best Foreign Piece for his Swan Lake, 4 Acts. Critics from Tanz magazine awarded him Dancer of the Year for 2008. Books on his work have been published in France, Germany, and the USA.
Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote of throwing the body into the fight. These words inspired me to go on stage. Other inspirations are the reality around me, the time in which I live, my memories of history, people, images, feelings and the power and beauty of music and the confrontation with one's own body which, in my case, does not correspond with conventional ideals of beauty. To see bodies on stage that do not comply with the norm is important - not only with regard to history but also with regard to present developments, which are leading humans to the status of design objects. On the question of success: it is important to be able to work and to go your own way - with or without success. I simply do what I have to do.
- Raimund Hoghe

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Concept, choreographer, set designer: Raimund Hoghe

Creative assistant: Luca Giacomo Schulte
Dancers: Ornella Balestra, Marion Ballester, Emmanuel Eggermont, Takashi Ueno, Raimund Hoghe, Luca Giacomo Schulte, Yuta Ishikawa

Music by: Franz Schubert, Edvard Grieg, George Frideric Handel, Johann Sebastian Bach, Irving Berlin, Charles Aznavour, Marianne Faithful and others
Lighting designer: Raimund Hoghe, Johannes Sundrup
Sound designer: Pascal Gehrke
Production manager: Judith Jaeger
Photography: © Rosa-Frank.com

Production: Raimund Hoghe – Hoghe & Schulte GbR (Düsseldorf)/ Cie VENTO (Paris)
Co-production: Festival Montpellier Danse 2015
Financial support by: Ministerium für Familie, Kinder, Jugend, Kultur und Sport des Landes Nordrhein Westfalen, Kunststiftung NRW, Kulturamt der Landeshauptstadt Düsseldorf
With the support of: Centre national de la danse (CND) Paris, Centre national de danse contemporaine (CNDC) Angers, La Ménagerie de Verre (Paris) dans le cadre de Studiolab, tanzhaus nrw Düsseldorf, Théâtre Garonne Toulouse, Montpellier Danse/ Résidence à l’Agora, Cité Internationale de la Danse
With special gratitude to agnès b. Paris.      

The visit of Raimund Hoghe happens with the support of Goethe-Institut and The Guest Performance Fund for Dance NATIONALES PERFORMANCE NETZ (NPN) which is kindly supported by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, by 14 Departments of Culture and Arts of the German federal state.