Heine Avdal, Yukiko Shinozaki – Unannounced

With their new creation unannounced, Heine Avdal & Yukiko Shinozaki focus on the way focus shifts when appearances change out of the blue. What, for instance, if a social situation’s framework suddenly shifts – like when a performance subtly starts among a waiting audience in the theatre’s foyer? What if it doesn’t even continue on stage, but first splits the audience up into smaller groups and invites each of them for a guided tour through other rooms of the respective building? What if, eventually, one of these rooms turns out to be the stage, in fact, but a stage on which the spectators find themselves among the performers – and vis-à-vis the tribune where they are usually supposed to sit? And what, finally, if the performance continues on this tribune as well, highlighting the entire theatre space as a site of negotiation with regard to the possible ways to position oneself – both among others and in relation to conditions which continually turn out to differ from what they were expected to be?

On its way into the black box, unannounced blurs the conventional distinctions between the ‘outside’ and the ‘inside’ of the aesthetic event, both in spatial and in temporal terms. By means of portable mini-projectors and torch lights, it literally goes into detail and sheds light on the small and smallest characteristics it passes by, highlighting them as fragments and partial aspects which disappear as soon as the next one shows up. The spaces and situations it passes through are both scanned with regard to their specific concreteness and charged with imaginations that transcend their actuality. A discontinuous, non-linear range of sensations unfolds, which possibly confuses the anticipation of its future with echoes and afterglows from its past. In the border zones of performance, dance and visual arts, unforeseen alliances between body and image, text and movement, light and sound, concreteness and abstraction emerge, and eventually, the ‘liveness’ of performance finds itself contained in a still-life – and vice versa.

Avdal and Shinozaki together started their own company fieldworks (formally named ‘deepblue’).
Since 2000 more than 20 productions were created, which all have been touring internationally.
The various productions are concerned with “performativity” and allow for an open interpretation of movement as a heterogeneous combination of a variety of media. Consequently, the artists draw on a broad range of disciplines and expertise: performance, dance, visual arts, video, music, and technology.
Every performance plays on the tension and contrast between the body and objects, the body and the mind, fact and fiction/representation, the tangible and the invisible, the organic and the artificial, …  Recurrent themes in the productions include the relationship between performer and spectator, the non-hierarchical approach to the various elements of a performance, and the exploration of both theatrical and non-theatrical environments.