posttheater

Female race-car driver Cla¨renore Stinnes was the first woman to drive around the world by car － from 1927 to 1929. Half of the time she had to repair her vehicle.
The piece narrates her story, deconstructs the fascination for speed and explains the importance of the tire as link between acceleration and slowing down. Maren Strack trained flag twirling for her choreography － and dancing with tires. A foley artist remixes the sound of rubber abrasion and adds a fascinating
live audio layer on the video-dance-performance. The source of the video projections is a remote controlled － and carefully choreographed － car. Figure 8 Race is a motor sport that longs for the crash. The performance confronts the audience with these contradictory worlds.

*"Figure 8 Race" is the second part of "6-8-10", a trilogy about trafic, technology and female pioneers.

<Selected Press Responses>

"Figure 8 Race" is a coherent, research based concept for a multi-media performance with a dance-solo in its center. The intended usage of video and audio technology is clearly serving the live performance, is motivated by the content and both technically surprising and thought through.
Strack and post theater prove an unusual sense for density of dramatic means: the figure 8 will be translated into equally archaic and motor-race related flag dance.
The cooperative work shows, how independent the team has moved from the classic concept of authorship. It had been a clear requirement for the award to consider the broadening of the concept of the author in the performing arts.
Apart from the concept of the new work, the jury scrutinized the earlier collaboration of Strack and post theater, especially the impressive production “6 Feet Deeper”. That piece shows coherency and continuity of their artistic approach, but also a surprisingly homogeneous and consequent usage of the employed media (dance / audio / video). Strack and her partners combine fresh themes, stories and information on a high intellectual level.”
From the report of the jury of the Bremen Author’s Award 2004

“Dance? History Lesson? Video installation? Sound collage? All of that, and then even dealing with seemingly dry subject matters such as the relationship between rubber and motor sports. The dance- and performance artist Maren Strack and the company post theater manage to do that extremely well. They succeeded in suprising, entertaining and enchanting the members of the audience at “Figure 8 Race”.
...
The most appealing part are the visual surprises by video artist Hiroko Tanahashi. So there is, for example, a beautiful flag dance of the dancer with a shadow that is projected on the floor.
...
One would have loved to see Maren Strack dance more that night!”
Sylter Rundschau, November 28th, 2005

[Short Video Documentation]