Throughout the summer, the team around Aimé C. Songe alias Clément Layes invites you to a personal encounter on a rowing boat, just in time for sunset. Together with different artists, the participants embark on a dreamlike journey to question the concept of an active and productive life and to take time to decelerate.
Image above: The river © Mayra Wallraff
THE RIVER – Part 1 is the first part of a project that extends over a whole year. The first part of the work takes place in summer and autumn outside on a small boat floating on the waters of Berlin. A team of five artists and performers will design and moderate these boat trips together and offer a ride for one spectator every day at sunset in summer and autumn. The second part of the project THE RIVER / Under Cover is developed by performer and choreographer Jasna L. Vinovrški. The performances will take place in winter at the Tanzfabrik.
Aimé C. Songe is an artist-personality of Clément Layes who takes the time to grieve and find new ways to connect with the audience and the world outdoors and in nature. Clément Layes has been creating works for the stage since 2004. His early works allege, to allege, the grune Sthul, things that surrounds, TITLE explored the nature of things, their namings and the way they are captured and organised by language. In his second series of works, Eternal return, emergency artist and ONON, Layes explores the ways in which we are defined by architectural and grammatical framings. His last work Living room (2021) was a turning point: on the one hand, it continued to interrogate the frames in which we live, in this case our living room, and on the other, it was the starting point of a critical reflection on the author’s position and name. Who signs the work?
“There is a desire within me to explore a new author with each work. By re-baptising my artistic persona, I continue to engage with the way we are defined by language, habits and grammatical patterns. There is a multiplicity of personas within me. With Clémentine M. Songe, we explored very personal issues related to the death of my mother, the experience of foreclosure, the increasing precarity of women artists and people in general, and the relegation of culture as a so-called non-essential activity. Faced with this sadness, Clémentine was almost numb: with so much sadness that she can hardly feel, hardly move. With ‘THE RIVER’ I bring another person outside: Aimé C. Songe, a new, more hopeful personality who takes the time to grieve and find new ways to connect with the audience and the world by working outdoors and bringing the audience into nature and onto the water. With his team he invites you into a dream, a moment where you can let go and float into the sunset. As Baudelaire wrote in his famous poem ‘The Journey’: ‘ Come here and be intoxicated by the strange foreign airs, of the hot afternoon that lasts forever!'”
Aimé C. Songe, from German language
CONCEPT Aimé C. Songe
ARTISTIC COOPERATION Jasna L. Vinovrški
DRAMATURGY Jonas Rutgeerts, Mila Pavicevic
MUSIC Steve Heather
MODERATORS/DIRECTORS Asaf Aharonson, Zinzi Buchanan, Shannon Cooney, Clément Layes, Thiago Rosa
BOOTSDESIGN Jonas Maria Droste, Clément Layes
COSTUME Malena Modeer
PRESS, COMMUNICATION Aïsha Mia Lethen Bird
PRODUCTION / OPERATION Tammo Walter, Tiphaine Carrère
DIRECTED by Danila-Freitag, Agentur für darstellende Kunst
A production by Public in Private. Supported by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe and by the Performing Arts Fund with funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media as part of NEUSTART KULTUR. Cie. Public in Private is supported by DIEHL+RITTER/TANZPAKT RECONNECT, funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media within the framework of
WHEN?
Friday, 17 June to Friday, 30 September at sunset
WHERE?
Treptower Park
12435 Berlin-Alt-Treptow
