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further projects directed by anne hirth:
no palm trees. no lions. no monkeys.
cielo in costruzione
blaubart
ausser betrieb
workshops
past is in front of ego
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teamreviewsphotosdates“The poetic climax of the festival is Anne Hirth’s “past is in front of ego”, a calm, mature meditation about the passing of time, about linearity and repetition. The performer Gregory Stauffer pushes himself flat across the stage and marks his passage with chalk. Over and over Stauffer repeats his movements, (over and over) he recycles them with sound, polaroid photos and chalk drawings. Finally, he drops the pattern and turns into a ticking pendulum on the wall.”
tagesspiegel berlin, october 13th, 2006
“Sensible, absurd comedy runs through the piece, that profits from the strong presence of the performer. (…) a lot of applause.”
hamburger morgenpost, october 26th, 2006
“(…) precise and a fascinating sense of bodily measurements (…)”
hamburger abendblatt, october 26th, 2006
“We also saw the quiet and hermetic production from Berlin: (…) a performance reduced to eight repeated sets of movements, a mystifying performance. The surreal concept of time invites you to strong visualizations of space. Once again Hirth dares/ risks – but she wins – brilliantly. (…) The courage to state her own aesthetic has been rewarded most richly.”
neue zürcher zeitung, november 29th, 2006
In contrast to her colleagues, whose works mainly scratched the surface, the director Anne Hirth took a deep dive into the phenomenon of time. Her piece “Past is in front of ego” shows how subjective and fragile our perception of space and movement really is. One performer crosses the stage over and over again, falls, marks his positions with chalk and records all sounds with a dictaphone. He creates various levels of time by repeating his movement patterns and accompanying them with these documents of sound - in so doing he causes our perception of chronology to collapse. The board of trustees should have selected more works of similar maturity.”
die deutsche bühne 12/06
“The most dense and most convincing choreography of this year’s Freischwimmer Festival (…) This pleasure is conceptionally thought through from a to z, and cunningly designed at the same time. (…) the choreography managed to hold the tension over the entire time – despite the fact that it consisted of repeated movement patterns. (…) This dramaturgically dense feast for the eyes seduces with poetic images to forget all laws of time and to indulge. Magnificent!”
p.s. zürich, november 30th, 2006
awarded at kontrapunkt festival sczcecin, poland, 2008 with the "zygmunt duczynski award for the most outstanding personality of the festival" for gregory stauffer as best performer, the university award of the students´ jury as well as the "golden review award" of the festival press. the performance had been invited as one of four german productions among works of rené pollesch, nicolas stemann and luc perceval. it also made it to the 2nd place in the audience voting.