Adam Linder:
Cult to the Built on What
Cult to the Built on What
Cult to the Built on What is a dance for three performers: a body, a lectern, and language. For this performance Linder has re-skilled as a rapper, merging the productive strategies of rap music with an interest in collaging divergent performativities. Further cementing an approach to the theatre as a field where cultural vernaculars and signifiers can intermingle. With this Rapography, Linder seeks a place for vernacular experience alongside the discourses of Western theatre.
I begin with the hope that this unyielding establishment we find ourselves in might disarm with each of my vocal caresses.
So I am going to break it down for you just like I would if I was up in my bedroom or conversing on the street.
We are babies suckling on the big breast of culture.
Like swelling waves, cultural forms envelop us and then imprint themselves on the psyche.
They speak through the individual with their own vocabulary.
Even if the cultural status of any given tendency is not aligned to your own trajectory, the effect that it may have on you is no match for the will.
Learned reflections are no match for the assuring sound of ''yes yes y'all'' or the ecstatic punch of a fist into the air or the sweet smell of new trainers.
Rhythms that bounce, bodily gestures and stylised goods.
These things surround me. They are powerful things. They tend to be too proximate to be critical of.
Its true they might share the ambiguous legacy of appropriation and commercialisation, but they haven't been exhausted of their expressive resistance.
In this context one might feel the need to situate these things within the value systems of the western proscenium.
If I would speak frankly I might say that the cultured class relishes rereading the same narrative.
Context Rules Everything Around Me.
C.R.E.A.M.
Learn the narrative.
Dollar dollar bills yo.
Listen here, this is what its about:
Investing in something quotidian and trite like walking a certain way or making words rhyme made me more than I could ever be.
(Adam Linder)
CONCEPT, PERFORMANCE Adam Linder STAGE DESIGN Shahryar Nashat, Adam Linder MUSIc, COMPOSITION Brendan Dougherty
Produced in scope of K3 Residenz-Choreographien 2013 by K3 | Tanzplan Hamburg. Funded by Hamburgische Kulturstiftung.
photo © Thies Rätzke
Adam Linder's practice relies on carefully crafted dance vocabularies to probe how choreography relates to desire, value, technology, and collective psyche. His solos and ensemble works, either for the stage or the exhibition space, incorporate text, props, costume, scenography, printed matter and musical compositions in various scales and with varying emphasis. He has presented solo and two-person exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney (2023), Museum of Modern Art MoMA, New York (2020), South London Gallery (2018), Kunsthalle Basel (2017), Schinkel Pavilion, Berlin (2016), and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2015). His stage works have been co-produced and presented by theatres such as HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin; Kampnagel, Hamburg; deSingel, Antwerp; Sadler's Wells, London; Dampfzentrale, Bern and UCLA CAP / Redcat, Los Angeles. In 2018, CCA Wattis, San Francisco presented the survey FULL SERVICE, which subsequently travelled to MUDAM Luxembourg. Linder has had commissions from Sydney Dance Company (2010), Ballet de Lorraine, Nancy (2023); and will create a new work for Danish Dance Theatre, Copenhagen in 2024.