10.00-11.00   Christine de Smedt, Les Ballets C de la B: "9x9"  
  In den bisherigen Aufführungen dieses künstlerischen Projektes arbeiteten 9 Künstler, Choreographen und Tänzer mit jeweils 9 Darstellern zum Thema "kollektiver Körper". Insgesamt waren in Paris, Gent, Rotterdam, Lissabon und Berlin immer 81 Personen auf der Bühne. Für die [kkk] hat Christine de Smeth eine neue Version der kollektiven Verbindung erarbeitet.

"9x9"
People moving in the city. Children in a schoolyard. Athletics and audience during the Olympic games, bodies competing or being entertained. Teenagers in a disco. A procession to a marriage. Babies crawling on blankets. Ordinary activities or choreographies of everyday, secret dances of the masses taking place her and now.



9x9 brings together dance, choreographic art, with different phenomena of mass and crowd. Creating dance from simple walking, generating crowds out of choreographic organisations. It is a dance performance that in it self is a mass in all its different facets, not a representation of external masses or behaviour patterns inside crowds. 9x9 exists as a research project, with a core group of 9 dancers who engage in 81 persons or participants, which together engage in a wide field of mass phenomena. The intention of the project is to create dance performances that have a strong connection to local contexts and to engage people from these environments as the centre of each performance.



9x9 is not only as massive dance performance, it also depict fundamental phenomena of the construction of masses and crowds. It breaks with scale, composition, tradition and boundaries between art and life. It's bigness, it exists, at most it coexists.
A mass, or a crowd, is always moving, growing, and erupting in a singular direction. A crowd can be constructed through dance, but can also be a dancing body in itself, consisting of thousand of bodies. From the outside a mass is always the same, it is constructed around an agreement of sameness. From the inside however every participant strives with his own specificity, without any possibility to perceive the movement of the mass as a whole. A mass is a feast, a flight, a celebration of gods, and the destruction of others. It can be the site of dangerous, non-humanitarian, opinions, but also the starting point of cultural change and motivations of enlarged empathy. Mass engages everybody as being part of community, or only few as members of sects, clubs, or neighbourhoods. It is an organisation in which one can disappear, and a sight for development of creativity, language and identity.
9x9 invite its participants as equals to create choreography where each and everybody can participate on his/her own terms. This mode of working does not only create dance and choreography that are specifically designed for large groups and masses, but is of importance as a social position, in the sense that the project invest in difference and personal identity. Ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class and social disposition henceforth become an active part in the projects activities.





Christine de Smedt, Tänzerin und Choreographin, zunächst Studium der Kriminologie in Leuven, währenddessen zahlreiche Tanzworkshops in Belgien und andernorts, stark beeinflußt durch Min Tanaka, Elaine Summers und die Alexander Technik. In den letzten Jahren verstärkte Zusammenarbeit mit David Hernandez und Meg Stuart, seit 1990 Mitglied von Les Ballets C. de la B., seit 2000 arbeitet sie an ihrem Projekt 9x9, das von Masse und Multiplizität handelt.