Sanfte Arbeit/Elsa Artmann: Langes Wochenende

In the organizer's words:

For freelance lovers, every date is a work date.

"Long Weekend" is dedicated to overlapping work and love relationships and thus to a romanticization of work that makes it difficult to draw boundaries between private and professional, unconventional and invasive, careless and violent. Based on the intimacy techniques of lap dance, we examine the physicalities of professionalized closeness and their intrusion into the private sphere. In new arrangements of love songs, we make audible the romantic promises that remain unfulfilled in a love relationship with work. In doing so, we do not fundamentally problematize blurring between the areas of life, but describe them as a reality from which different things can follow: The professional intimacy between audience and performer as well as within the ensemble harbors risks of mutual exploitation as well as utopian potential: what if we understand and cultivate all working relationships as love relationships that must be protected from mutual exploitation?

In the ensemble SANFTE ARBEIT (formerly Artmann&Duvoisin), we work on interdisciplinary formats based on dance, which have recently developed in the direction of contemporary musicals. We look at topics that we initially feel powerless in the face of - such as the nuclear family, housing, our media testimony, our dance-practical embodiment of neoliberal values - and create "exercises for other conditions". We understand our practice as documentary in a synopsis of everyday experience and (media) witnessed contemporary events.

Since 2022, we have been exploring (emotional, care and relational) work in cultural capitalism in various formats (in addition to stage plays in radio plays, short films and a digital platform for collaborative writing). We run the Labor und Liebe laboratory, in which artists and people in care professions meet every two weeks in a joint writing and movement practice.

Artistic direction, choreography, dance Elsa Artmann

Choreography, dance Diana Treder, Anne-Lene Nöldner

Composition and live scoring Annie Bloch

Dramaturgical accompaniment, Outside Eye Valerie Wehrens, Lili M. Rampre, Samuel Duvoisin

Costume mentoring Noemi Baumblatt

Sound Thomas Meckel

Lighting Jasper Diekamp

Photo Arne Schmitt

Graphics Ondine Pannet

Press and public relations neurohr und andrä

Langes Wochenende (premiere on November 22, 2024 at TanzFaktur Köln) is funded by the Kunststiftung NRW and the Cultural Office of the City of Cologne.

It is co-produced by TanzFaktur Köln and supported by Tanzresidenz 2024 at Quartier am Hafen Köln.

Content Note: Sexualized references. Physical contact with people in the audience, whose consent will be clarified in advance. The premiere will be filmed for documentation purposes, individuals in the audience can be anonymized.