Kobalt Works

CRACK is a collaboration of Kobalt Works | Arco Renz and Amrita Performing Arts with six emerging choreographers and dancers from Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

There are three dramaturgical lines in CRACK.

Change: Cambodian dancers born in the 1980s have no direct experience of the Pol Pot-regime. They grew up with memories inherited from their elders. The rapid social transformations over the last decade demands that the young generation of artists tread between the old and new: not forget the past, yet also to create their own personalities.

Individuality. The six performers in CRACK undergo a choreographic formation that re-calibrates classical Khmer-dance, setting both mind and body into ebbs and flows of freedom and control. The ethos of ‘knowing oneself better through the act of difficult labour’ becomes a philosophy in negotiating the role of self within the function of community. Radicalizing tradition by the means of revealing the personal signature is always somewhat an unstable, unfinished and magnetic process.

Vitality. The energy flows that animate the liveliness of the performers stem from breathing. Intensities – dispersions – compressions – sublimations. The presence of the body transmits through somatic affects from within. At the moment of dancing, each performer delivers an individual ‘truth’ that turns away from the story-telling archive and the architecture of rigid torso, arched spine, upturned fingers and non-contact. An on-going collocation, a living matter.