PREMIERE: CocoonDance Junior Company // Sound & Vision // 2 July 2021 // Ballsaal-Container/ Opernvorplatz, Bonn

PREMIERE: CocoonDance Junior Company // Sound & Vision // 2 July 2021 // Ballsaal-Container/ Opernvorplatz, Bonn


SOUND & VISION can finally be experienced live. The new piece by the CocoonDance Junior Company was supposed to premiere in June 2020. It had to be postponed to February 26, 2021, in the middle of the pandemic and, of course, online. So in the forced standstill, the piece became SOUND & VISION, SOUND & VISION – the film. The young ensemble adapted the project to the digital space and its specific possibilities and limits: the footage material of dances for the day X combines with conversations about hopes and fears of the young people to a cross-media bricolage*, which is reinforced by selected music by Ludwig van Beethoven, in a new arrangement by Jörg Ritzenhoff (among others “BeatBeethoven”), the perceived break with the old and thus becomes a unique experience. By means of sampling, remix, loop and similar contemporary techniques, Jörg Ritzenhoff boldly and respectfully directs the rhythmic focus on the classical work and confronts it with the beats and moves of today, as a historical interface of dance and music.

The live performance, which has now been restaged, will co-topic and co-stage this experience and perception of limbo, as well as the experience with digital spaces and communication from that time. The project becomes a form of expression chosen by the Junior Company Bonn to show the zeitgeist of their generation. They dance as representatives of the generation between the dawn of climate change and pandemic-induced standstill, which is rethinking the word “normality”. The end of “Sound & Vision” in the stream had to be left open, but can now be realized and finished after the relaxations, when the streets, squares and parks are open again for a dancemob!

Funded by the NRW State Office for the Performing Arts as part of the conceptual funding of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia and the Federal City of Bonn.