ISABELLA OBERLÄNDER is a dance artist, who engages with choreographic processes that embrace the advocacy of the dancing body. All the while working to explore a visceral articulation of physicality and thought. Oberländer’s practice is guided by ongoing fascinations with identity/intersectional feminist politics, performativity and otherness. Currently she is Associate Artist with Dance Limerick. 

 

Glisten

Unlocking hierarchies and conversing with aliens - Glisten - What does it take to imagine a realm for multitude - a speculative future?
Isabella presents a digital excerpt of her project Glisten in collaboration with visual artist Martina Cleary.

Alienation, otherness and sweaty dancing. 

Glisten is an inquiry into what is already felt but not yet visible. It is a performative exploration, deeply rooted in the dancing body. It strives to excavate how the experiences, reality and imagination of otherness manifest in the physical. Embracing the provocations of the Xenofeminist manifesto, it offers an invitation to imagine multiple visions of a non-binary speculative future. Glisten, is a new solo work, that is centred by a physical performative practice. It focuses on the materiality of the body, spatial relationships and triggering new territories through the provocations of Xenofeminist Manifesto and speculative fiction.

Falco’s pop video ‘Junge Römer’, I watched on TV when I was a kid. It was probably my first positive and encouraging experience of Otherness. Over the past year this song kept re-surfacing, seemingly randomly at first. In the refrain of the song there is one line that stuck with me “Young Romans dance differently than the others”. Acknowledging this, in combination with simultaneously reading of ‘The Xenofeminist Manifesto: A Politics of Alienation’, by Laboria Cuboniks - I started questioning how one might utilise the agency of dance to explore and seize alienation as an impetus to generate new worlds. “We are all alienated - but have we ever been otherwise?”, is a trigger to explore these new territories through an embodied movement practice. I am connecting to these territories by developing a new performative practice focused on the articulation of choreographic scores. Anchoring the physicality in anatomical specifies and imaginative settings, allows to access a highly visceral movement vocabulary whilst offering the spectator a clear opening into the work.

EVENT Released Sunday 13 December at 1:30pm, available until Friday 18 December 2020

CREDITS
Lead Artist, Choreography and Performance: Isabella Oberländer
Choreographic Mentor: Lucy Suggate
Sound Composer: Elll (Ellen King)
Costume Designer: Giordana Giache
Lighting Designer: Gearoid Ó Hallmhuráin
Co-Producer/Director, Dance Limerick: Jenny Traynor
Photography & Film - Production & Documentation: Martina Cleary

Co-produced by Dance Limerick. Supported by the Arts Council Project Award, Limerick City & County Council, Dance Ireland, Dublin Fringe Festival, Dublin Dance Festival, Dancer from the Dance Festival and Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre.

UILLINN RESEARCH RESIDENCY Isabella received a week long research residency from Uillinn, 3 to 10 November 2020 to develop her new work ‘Glisten’ in association with Dance Limerick. The residency along with a public workshop was intended to allow Isabella time to connect with artist networks and audiences in the locality prior to a live performance of the work. The residency was cancelled due to government restrictions and we are working with Isabella to re-schedule a new residency in 2021/2022

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