In The patient, the limbs of all nine performers entwine to form one literal sounding body: Through an emotional score of physically created sounds, they seem to have merged into one single organism that is impacting on them, sometimes tenderly, sometimes crudely, releasing intense energy – ranging from ecstatic trance states to mourning grief. This sound performance flings the dancers into the tension between nature and culture, between guttural creatureliness and iconographic moments of almost sacral proportions, thus continuing Riepe’s performative quest for a new position of the “human creature” within nature. The patient unfolds its ritually cleansing impact, virtually healing in a performative experience, in institutions, museums, and exhibition venues, in the open nature or in other, uninhabited spaces. “The title, on the one hand, came about in the rehearsal context, because the sound production by means of other people’s bodies carried an aspect of care, very much patient-like,” Riepe explains. “Our first working version amid the forest brought with it another layer of meaning, though: In a union with nature, humanity itself is ’the patient’. We destroy the world, but nature will eventually persist when the ‘human patient’ has long since left this earth. So, The patient campaigns for a loving care – for ourselves, for each other, but also for the complex natural fabric that carries us.”

The Patient receives support from: Fonds Darstellende Künste with funds granted by the Federal Government Commissioner for Arts and the Media, the Ministry for Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, Kunststiftung NRW, and the Cultural Department of the State Capital of Düsseldorf.

Ben J. Riepe is represented by Kunst & Denker Contemporary.

https://www.benjriepe.com/en/inprogress/the-patient/