Dessert sands, whip -cracking: Cirucs Media Performance!

In this highly interdisciplinary multimedia performance “6 Feet Deeper", physics meets the Wild West. Therefore performer Maren Strack learned whipping and made it the center of her choreography. As starting point post theater uses biographic sources, first the myth of Calamity Jane, the only female cowboy, second the physicist Ernst Mach.
Maren Strack dances with the whip as an object and a motif. The whip is an enlargement of the body, a communication tool in supersonic velocity, a dangerous weapon, a tool, a snake - equally peculiar and strange to the user. The stage is a huge video projection at her feet. The animated figures respond to the performer's movements and cracking sounds of the whip.

*"6 Feet Deeper" is the first part of "6-8-10", a trilogy about trafic, technology and female pioneers.

＜Selected Press Responses＞

" ...Very beautiful and funny. Also mysterious-surreal, when Strack, like a magician, brings virtual creatures on the sand arena - and then whip-cracks them away. Very beautiful, when big swarms of her reduced multiplied self, float two-tailed and dance a shadow-choreography in the sand. Again a crack on the right, a crack on the left - and the Dakota-fatamorgana is extinguished... things like these must be repeated!"
Malve Gradinger in Muechner Merkur, January 17th / 18th, 2004

"...(Maren Strack) combines in her peculiar way visual art and dance, object and sound. The resistance of the object and the material join in her attractive person with wit, poetry and ironic easiness... She swings her whip above our heads, we feel the breeze, the whip hums, whistles, sings, hisses. An echo in oneﾇs own stomach. The video to her feet shows oscillating waves. With her whip crack Maren Strack calls small, video-animated whip-ladies on the sand, that swarm around her like scorpions, get in a circled order, and disappear after a crack. Does the performer direct the video? Or do her actions react on the very beautiful installation? It doesnﾕt matter, after a very fine 30 minute-performance we are able to answer our child the question: ﾒMama, why does a whip crack?"
Katja Schneider in Suedeutsche Zeitung, January 17th / 18th, 2004

"... In the end Ernst Mach, the discoverer of the sound barrier, and the cowgirl both profit in Strackﾕs fascinating show from the supersonic bang"
tz, January 15th, 2004

"Fast as a horse, a propeller aero-plane, a bullet, a Concorde ﾐ a bang on the right, a bang on the left ﾐ and the shadow images by media artist Hiroko Tanahashi fly over the sand ﾐ a spectacular performance."
Ronny von Wangenheim in Ruhr Nachrichten, May 22nd, 2004

"... a bull-whip show, so performed with ease, that the audience could possibly estimate the difficulties and the precision of the act.
ﾉ Rarely has there been a dance so clear and impressive as Strack's "6 Feet Deeper.
ﾉ The projections by the Japanese video artist Hiroko Tanahashi (post theater), create astonishingly simple, accessible images, far from the 1990s hieroglyphs that were considered a must by media artists and dancers then. In Maren Strack's work all becomes easy - never the less it follows rigid precision and perfect timing - one even forgets the incredible effort this must take. The spectator's mind is not lost in riddles, though he faces an increasing amount of information with increasing speed. He receives information under the flying whip, unfolding in slow motion..."
Arnd Wesemann in Ballet tanz, June 2004

Next Show:
May 13th 2008		Festival: Theaterszene Europa Studiobuehne, Cologne