Laurie Young: After Work Tours #1 – Sophiensæle | Independent Theater in Berlin
Laurie Young: After Work Tours #1
Sophiensæle is located in a building rich in history—a history told by the ceiling decorations, cracks in the walls, and drawings on old doors, as well as by the intangible spirits and memories that inhabit this building. The walls, stairwells, and columns also reveal much about the evolution of labor over the 120 years of its existence—and about emancipation, resistance, democratization, and self-organization, as well as the violence, coercion, and exploitation that manifested within and alongside it.
Building on the format of the Historical house tours regularly offered at Sophiensæle, three Berlin-based artists are developing new site-specific performances as commissioned works for the festival. The After Work Tours take individual moments between past and present, personal memory and political history as a starting point for artistic explorations of the building—and tell the story of how work shapes bodies, biographies, and ideas.
For over a century, Sophiensæle has been a place where people gathered around shared struggle: trade unionists, revolutionaries and more recently artists. Researching this history, dancer Laurie Young came across Milly Witkop, anarchist, syndicalist, feminist, who brought to these halls a belief that care work is labor and collective refusal is a form of power.
Youngfirst performed here with Allee der Kosmonauten in 1996. She now wonders what the next thirty years of the building will hold. Retracing both her and Witkop’s steps, she leads a guided tour through the rooms of Sophiensæle, moving between their two moments, and asking what would happen if cultural workers ceased to work.
By and with: Laurie Young
Outside eye, dramaturgy: Siegmar Zacharias
Thanks to: Isaac Dixon, Milo Millwood
After Work Tours #1 is being produced in co-operation with Sophiensæle as part of the festival Never Work. Never Work—International Performance Festival is a festival by Sophiensæle, supported by the Capital Cultural Fund (HKF). Sophiensæle is supported by the Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion. Media partners: Berlin Art Link, Missy Magazine, Siegessäule, taz.
Laurie Young was a member of the Canadian dance research lab Le Groupe Dance Lab from 1992 to 1996. In 1996, she moved to Berlin, performed in Sasha Waltz‘ Allee der Kosmonauten, and has since collaborated with the company, first as a member of the ensemble and later as a guest artist. From 2000 to 2003, Young was a member of the ensemble at the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz. Internationally, she has danced for choreographers such as Meg Stuart, Constanza Macras, Benoit Lachambre, Emio Grecco, Eszter Salomon, Animal Farm Collective, Grayson Millwood and Nasser Martin-Gousset. Her works include the solo Brand New Bag and OmU. In 2007, Laurie was artist-in-residence at fabrik Potsdam. In 2009, she founded the collective The Plant with Panagiota Kallimanis and Philipe Loureco, which develops site-specific installations. She has also collaborated with filmmakers, set designers, and video artists, among others. Her solo piece Natural Habitat (2011) premiered at the Natural History Museum in Berlin. Her collaborative choreographic project with Janet Cardiff and George Burres Miller, Alter Bahnhof Video Walk, was presented at Documenta (13) in Kassel in 2012. Her works have been on view at Sophiensæle since 2014.