FUTURE RELATIONS

FUTURE RELATIONS is an interdisciplinary, choreographic long-term project (2023 – 2026) in search of sustainable relationships in times of worsening climate catastrophes. Scientific approaches to solutions are available, decisions and transformations are necessary, but still, too little is happening. Over the next three years, Antje Velsinger /new trouble will therefore use artistic means to investigate various alternative relationships both to ecological resources and between generations. The goal is to create a transformation process together with young people and adults, looking for ways of dealing with and ways out of the crisis.

The whole conception for FUTURE RELATIONS is based on the following thesis: in order to find ways out of the ecological crisis, in order to enable a future that is worth living for future generations, we have to stop referring primarily to ourselves here and now. We need to search for and develop practices and strategies here and now that will enable us to engage in FUTURE RELATIONSHIPS.
In the 22/23 season, we will explore the relationship to the future from the perspective of parents in THEIR FUTURE. In the format of a stage play, we will stage the conflict between the parental need to protect and provide for their own children and the knowledge that the world into which we are releasing our children is not being adequately protected and increasingly destroyed by us adults. Premiere: 22 & 23 September 23 / Tanzhaus NRW, Düsseldorf.

In the durational performance GOODBYE/FAREWELL (2023/24), we will address the question of how we can transform feelings of powerlessness into new energy. What does it take for us to become capable of acting? How do we learn to let go of old habits and illusions and say goodbye?

Then we take a concrete look into the future. Together with young people aged 12 to 22, we design a research process: What do we need to practice and learn today in order to prepare a common future? What alliances do we form, what physical skills do we need? In training rooms we develop strategies that we want to bundle in the interactive installation with live performance OUR FUTURE (2024/2025). In the last part OUR FUTURE / ELSEWHERE AND OTHERWISE (2025/2026) we, in return, invite young people to join us in designing performative presentation formats for the stage, but also for other public analog and digital spaces.

PART #1 of the FUTURE RELATIONS series.

Premiere: September 22, 2023 at Tanzhaus NRW / Düsseldorf.

The escalating ecological crisis confronts parents with a conflict: the need to protect and provide for one’s children meets the knowledge that we, as an adult generation, are increasingly destroying the world we leave to our children. In the choreographic work THEIR FUTURE, we will deal with this conflict and the resulting relationships between parents and children.

Within a series of interviews we will ask parent couples (in queer, homosexual or heterosexual relationships), single mothers and fathers how they experience this conflict. What impact does the ecological crisis have on the lives of parents? What specific fears, hopes, desires, expectations, and ideas about the future arise for them? And how do these feelings affect their relationships with their children or the next generation? In addition, we seek to talk with people who have consciously decided against parenthood in view of the climate crisis.As an introduction to the rehearsals, we extract from the interviews images of mothers and fathers and the relationship descriptions, gestures, actions, attitudes and modes of touch associated with them. From this, we develop different modes of dance interaction between the generations. We translate the visions of the future of our interview partners into an acoustic weather landscape. Extreme phenomena such as heavy rain or heat are produced on stage by Foley Art and various analog and digital weather machines and are thus made tangible for the audience.

Four adult dancers will be present live on stage and interact on a video level with five children between the ages of 1 and 7. The video work shows the children in a different, fictitious place. Is this place a climate capsule, a dystopian landscape, an underwater world, or a paradise created by the children themselves? What resources are still available and what are the children doing in these imagined settings? What practices of care and what safe spaces can we offer them in the future? And what do they prefer to care for themselves?