WASHINGTON, D.C. |  Tonight, July 8, a young D.C. troupe will screen a film that documents that making of its new dance/theatre project Trust by the German writer/director Falk Richter.

The courageous company force/collision has been in search of a dance vocabulary that suits Richter’s virulently comic attack on consumer capitalism. I saw an early work-in-progress performance of Trust on the last day of a June 13 to 16 workshop at Arena Stage.

force/collision‘s Trust consists mostly of the original text of Falk Richter (b. 1969 in Hamburg), a rising contemporary German playwright/director and an associate dramatist with the Schaubühne in Berlin. He gave force/collision his blessing to gives his work what he calls “a new and original twist” that “places it into an American context.” The title of force/collision‘s version is called Trust me, perhaps a gesture to the fact that director/adapter John Moletress incorporates “additional source material” that, according to a prepared statement, “explores the effects of today’s high-tech Western global economy and of the culture of (American) consumerism’s on the human psyche and human relationships.”

German playwright/director Falk Richter
German playwright/director Falk Richter

The film will be screened 6:30 pm Monday, 8 July 2013, at Goethe-Institut Washington, GoetheForum. It features English and German languages. Tickets are free, but reservations are strongly recommended. Call (202) 289-1200.Performances of Trust me will be followed by an open rehearsal, giving audience members the opportunity to see the process in action, along with a brief post-show discussion about the performance, development and work of force/collision.

If you go, join in on the conversation by tweeting your thoughts and responses using #trustproject and @forcecollision.

The core of the piece rests in its choreography. In the German production Richter worked with the choreographer Anouk van Dijk to realize the performance design, which scenographically explodes the theme of individualism run amok. Germans do have a language to rely on: tanztheater.

In the U.S., our choreographic resources come from different traditions. One of the most fascinating aspects of the Arena Stage workshop I saw was force/collision’s brave attempts to publicly search for its own dance/movement-based vocabulary that conveys Richter’s anarchic, headlong narrative spurred by anger and desire and a whirligig of political questioning. -rg

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