For "Wesenwelt" choreographer Kristin Ryg Helgebostad and composer and carillonist Laura-Marie Rueslåtten transform the ensemble into a collective musical instrument. All the dancers hold at least one bell in their hands - each with a different pitch. Every movement leads to a sound and every sound requires a movement, which makes the music visible.

On stage the ensemble acts as a collective subject in which each individual is dependent on the group and vice versa. What happens, if they can’t join together like well-oiled cogs in a gearbox? The collective whole can only exist, if it can include deviations. This results in a vulnerability which affects the collective as well as all its members - a precarious state that can only be balanced through humour.

As with a beehive, it is difficult to tell whether one is dealing with a single swarm-like creature or a multitude of individuals. And are they human? Who's to say!

Kristin Ryg Helgebostad

Kristin Ryg Helgebostad is a dancer and choreographer who combines a wide range of performative and choreographic strategies in her practice. She studied contemporary dance and choreography at the National Academy of the Arts in Oslo, Norway, and now works with a range of partners.

Her pieces have been performed at various festivals and have toured Europe. She created “Soil Girl” and “Spoiler” together with the trio Berstad/Helgebostad/Wigdel. Laura Marie-Rueslåtten is one of Norway’s few professional carillon players. Together the two artists founded the handbell ensemble Ula Metall and created the pieces “Me Too/Thee Too” and “Cheers”.

In the European painting tradition landscapes are always framed via their relation to humans. They are displayed as the scene of communal rites, as gardens and forests that belong to a place and make it a homeland, as commodities that can be appropriated. From the immediate surroundings to the shores of the continent and beyond the European landscape paintings give a distorted image of the environment, resulting in a society that has a distorted relationship to the world. "Warpscapes" engages with these distortions, pursues them, exaggerates them and thus attempts to newly open up to nature in an artificial way.

Landscapes are created on stage, which the dancers inhabit as not-only-human creatures, which they design and examine, which they observe and in which they disappear. Discovering distortions and amplifying them, warping is the central method in order to approach the constant and contradictory changes in the living world – without having to negate its artificiality.

Sergiu Matis

Sergiu Matis is a Romanian choreographer living in Berlin since 2008. He created dance performances such as "Neverendings" (2017), "Hopeless." (2019), "Extinction Room" (2019), "Unrest" (2021), "Drang" (2022) and "Blazing Worlds" (2023). His work has been presented at festivals throughout Europe.

His dance practice can be understood as a tireless search in physical and digitalized archives. His performances provoke intense experiences that break with expectations, point to a new understanding of dance and reflect the complexity of our time.