Clemens Habicht
SYDNEY DANCE COMPANY

YEARS

YEARS is a 45 minute performance of a new dance work created for the camera. Years is a sequence of 31 solos by eight dancers responding to an original arrangement by Stephen Emmerson of Bach’s Goldberg Variations performed live by two pianos. Each solo is considered as a dance duet between the dancer and the camera in motion, a performer and their audience, and is achieved in a single take. The finale Aria de Capo revisits each choreography as a still image that renders the dance as a notation, like that of a musical score. Years was commissioned as the inaugural project in the Neilsen Studio performance space

IMPERMANENCE

Impermanence is the result of conversations shared between Rafael, Bryce and Clemens around ideas of loss and a beauty that exists only in the now as an ephemeral moment, the conceptual beginnings came from a new cello composition The Forest by Bryce Dessner (The National) upon witnessing the Notre Dame fire in Paris in which the ancient oak of an entire forest was lost in just a few hours.

Having had to postpone the world premier of Impermanence in the face of the global pandemic, the resonance of the initial concept of the transience and fragility of human relationships, the world around us and life, became even more significant. Laden with meaning and relevance in a new world, this film has evolved to face the frailty of an unknown future.

ANIMA

In collaboration with Sydney Dance Company creative director Rafael Bonachela invited Clemens to create a new dance work Anima.

Directly echoing the dancers with whom they share the stage, visual projections are spirit-like echoes that extend beyond and outside the physicality of the bodies of the dancers, flooding the stage in radiant, vibrating chords of colour that render an inner emotional world large, exposed and brilliant. We glimpse these apparitions as a spirit-like echo extending beyond and outside the physical bodies of the dancers, as souls in flight.

The projections were generated through a process of three dimensional scanning that captured the dancers’ choreography, with an invisible virtual camera exploring new angles and viewpoints simultaneous to the dance on stage the dancers are recognisable through motion, revealing the gestures of choreography, rather than corporeal shape.

Complimentary colours further isolate and remove the dancers from the confines of the stage context and create real world auras and ethereal afterimage effects.

CAROUSEL

A collaboration with Sydney Dance Company and David Jones for Autumn Winter 2016 choreographed by Rafael Bonachela, featuring the dancers of the Sydney Dance Company, music by Laurence Pike.