Presentation text for Anna Röthlisberger’s new piece “underground winds“ written during the creation residency in Israël in Oct / Nov 2011.

Two bodies, two presences, two singular energies submitted to the same flow of matter. Two active spines infuse through their movement the layers of the flesh, liberating the flow of a vast memory with its subtle interplay of animal kingdom, vegetable evolution and mineral latency.

Two organisms, mutually acknowledging their common origins, create through the reflections of a mimetic play, the vibratory field of a wider body imbued with the intensity of magma. Traversed by underground winds, moved by a web of organic connections, the bodies re-invent themselves through their own inertia, giving rise to a progressive eruption of human contours, outlining the feminine profiles of two individuals.

Space builds up in layers from the ground where the bodies find the initial support for their vertical rise. Pushed by the influx of a motivity resounding out towards the peripheral limbs, exploring the spherical dimension of the dual relation, the movement draws itself, asserts its trace, and establishes the foundation of a dance in the becoming.

Drawn from an ageless temporality, the sound scape forms a sliding architecture from which the continuity of a cycle emerges, weaving together the abstract threads of different eras. A horizontal organisation propagates between space, bodies and sounds, where songs of intimacy confront the drifting perspective of a universal quest.

Anna Röthlisberger offers here an intimate piece which marks a transition point in her work as a choreographer. Leaving aside all narrative thread, she allows the flesh to speak beneath all sense of identity. Nurtured by several long stays in Israël, a country in which the daily fractures of otherness resound, she takes the risk of not naming, to allow a common ground to reveal itself and gradually open up a space for encounter.

Yanaël Plumet
Tel Aviv, November 2011