bodyRealities – cityCodes

The new production "bodyRealities – cityCodes" deals with the complex structures of the ghanaian capital Accra and its inhabitants.

In its two-year dance and video art production bodyRealities, the DIN A 13 dance company examines the impact that places, landscapes, and locations of personal experience have on individual body memories and how these spaces are reflected in physical movement.

Together with film authors Miriam Jakobs and Gerhard Schick, choreographer Gerda König traced these contexts already in Sri Lanka in 2016.

Now the research has led the artistic team to the African metropolis of Accra in Ghana. In the urban areas of the sprawling city, they find rural structures in informal settlements organised with their own administration. These slum settlements extend along a river front, a railway track or a street of high-rise buildings, where the values and products of globalization seem unattainable for a majority of the population behind the shiny glass façades. The attempt to understand the city and its people inevitably leads to a confrontation with past and modern-day slavery, the consequences of colonization and globalization. Accra is a melting pot of past and present consisting of different ethnic groups, languages and cultures.