PULSE!

PULSE! is an album and a dance performance that traces and maps new, invisible circuits of energy transmission: From the black coal that once upon a time was melting steel and fuelling our power plants towards the energy of the sun illuminating the stage set; from an imaginary diamond needle traveling lightly over the black surface of an invisible vinyl record - generating the immaterial substance of Till Brönner’s music - into the bodies of six dancers, resonating and sparkling from the stage of the Bochum theatre.

Jazz trumpetist and photographer Till Brönner spent two years conducting excursions through the Ruhrgebiet in order to make photographic portrait studies of the area and its inhabitants. Inspired by the memories, sights, smells and sounds of the region, Brönner and his team now composed an original sound score, capturing the area in filmic and pulsating waves, creating a musical record as final outcome of this journey.

An international team of dancers guided by choreographer / stage director Nicole Beutler embodies the sensitivities and the energy proposed by Brönner’s compositions, celebrating vitality, resilience, transformation, camaraderie, multifaceted and multilingual collaboration and a hope for the future - not by preaching about it but by liberating its kinetic potential, imagination and poetry.

Like in a concert or on a record, PULSE! is a choreographic journey in 14 tracks, each one with its own title, mood and atmosphere. Each one with its own dance. Each one reflecting a different perspective on an area with many faces. The Ruhrgebiet, a compelling geographic and ethnographic location, as a laboratory for the future.

Here, the memory of the industrial past confronts the phantasm of a "cleaner" postindustrial future. The “band” of young dancers navigates the contradictory dimensions of time, locating their own “now” somewhere between the collapse of the past and the emergence of the future, reflecting with their sensitivity, physicality and team spirit the youthfulness of an area in transformation. How must it feel to belong to a generation that remembers the notoriously glorious and complicated past of the region only through stories? How vital or remote is one’s connection with that history whose reminders are dotted all around, monuments of industrial heritage? And what is that "clean" energy which the current era of ecological consciousness promises?

Pictures taken the second week of February 2024 during a research & rehearsal week in Amsterdam.