Under my Gaze

Under my Gaze
Renae Shadler & Collaborators

The Sun gazes upon the Earth, creating and destroying life, the engine on which our ecosystems depend. Under my Gaze is a ritual for our times - created by choreographer Renae Shadler together with Aerocene - a sculpture inflated by air, carried by wind and lifted only by the Sun. Bodies and voices pulse with the gravitational pull and combustive power of this solar giant, tracing the Sun’s movements through limb and skin, through reflection and darkness.

Under my Gaze is performed by three people and the Aerocene sculpture, presented on the historic Tempelhofer Feld. The Aerocene sculpture gives a body to the unseen forces that surround us: connecting Earth-bound dancers to aerial and cosmic worlds in a transforming landscape of shadowy creatures and molten forms.

The quartet explore ways to see the Sun without eyes, learning from other creatures – phototropic plants, hydra that sense light with their tentacles. The audience bears witness to this fierce and at times delicate interplay of force and form, tuning in via headphones to the rhythmic stomps and ethereal flight of these four bodies.

Under my Gaze proposes a new poetics of movement fuelled not by fossilised energy, but by the gaze of the Sun itself; moving with – rather than extracting from – the invisible forces that stir and surround us.

Concept, Choreography, Performance: Renae Shadler | Performance: Mickey Mahar, Dorota Michalak | Composition: Samuel Hertz | Set design: Camille Lacadee | Costume design: Geraldine Arnold | Dramaturgy: Ally Bisshop, Maikon K | Production, Distribution: Dörte Wolter | Production assistant: Undine Sommers | Photos: Piotr Pietrus | Video: Camille Lacadee | Inspired by Susurrus group, 2017-2020: Samuel Hertz, Maria Nurmela, Kalle Ropponen, Renae Shadler

Presented by Renae Shadler & Collaborators in collaboration with Aerocene Foundation. Supported by Fonds Darstellende Künste with funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media within the program NEUSTART KULTUR.