Foto Susanne Hoss

ISSON

conception/ choreography Toula Limnaios

dance/ creation Lena Meierkord, Toula Limnaios

composition/ music Ralf R. Ollertz

lighting design Klaus Dust

chor. assistence Ulrich Huhn

press Silke Wiethe

“ISSON is dedicated to contrasts, reality and illusion, light and dark, restlessness and quiet.
The dream is hidden inside the works of Jean-Paul Richter (19th century author and philosopher). Long novels, eccentric stories of a man who has left us the key to his restlessness.

His whole life long he was pursued by the idea of a double. Two realities that cannot be separated. The dream is not an alternate reality; it flows over both, enlightens or darkens them.
Shadows: a dark zone, formed by obscure bodies that break the rays of the light’s source. The shadows stand in the way of the passing light.

Every sad and dark thought is a fleeting and passing thought, an ephemeral idea of fear. Every worry of the soul, every black melancholy is “illusion”.”
(Toula Limnaios)

A cie. toula limnaios production.

press reviews

When Schubert found his doubles: movement harmony is considered virtuosity in dance.

In their new choreography ISSON, Toula Limnaios and Lena Meierkord prove that synchrony can mean much more than simple diligence of training: it is the absolute unity of two spheres, two bodies and beings (gr. Isson). In the beginning, the two dancers stand in the dull twilight of the empty stage facing the back wall: two identical figures on white dance floor. The following hour will lead them to the front very close to the first row of seating in the Theater am Halleschen Ufer.

With the exception of a few passages, they will move entirely in unison and not leave their dance space. The distance between them lessens in the darkly colored dynamics, the finely nuanced mood levels of the choreography. In synchrony it is not virtuosity, which is demonstrated but the fusion of two states of awareness.

In the end, Franz Schubert’s deathly rigid „The Double“ crystallizes itself out of the Ralf R. Ollertz’s soundscape. The song describes a lovers’ house in with toneless density; a house, in which she has ceased to live for some time now. But still, even as an empty hull, it speaks of past happiness. Limnaios and Meierkord there while stand motionless, slightly contorted, crooked and decrepit. Who remains in the movement? What being lives in dance.

This utterly composed decrescendo is one of the most moving and enlightening closing images that I have seen in dance theatre in a long time.

Franz Anton Cramer, Tagesspiegel, 14. March 2003.

Things are rarely as they seem and a back is not just a back.

It can be a wall, over which hair falls like a waterfall. It can be a stage, on which two hands perform a dance. Or armor that hides a vulnerable face...
Toula Limnaios returns to pure, unadorned movement and produces a form conscious piece of choreography, her unto most mature. The almost frightening synchrony of the dancers, irritates the viewer, who only after taking a closer look finds two fundamentally different worlds: Limnaios, the delicate, exudes herself into the space, while Meierkord stays with herself, more closed.

The rhythm of the composition in empty space follows the deflections of a soul that is looking for orientation and finds mostly irritation. Once, she returns fully concentrated to herself, only to have her hand carried her off in the next moment. In the end, inner peace lies in the conscious ups and downs between hope and depression, light and shadows.

A small, excellent evening of dance.

Constanze Klementz on “ISSON“ in: Berliner Morgenpost, 16. March 2003.