Aydın Teker's new creation: harS

The choreographer Aydın Teker, the pioneer of contemporary dance in Turkey, carries on exploring the process of ‘becoming’ of the human body in its extensionality in her new choreographic piece harS. It is an inventive symbiosis between a human body and a harp, in which unexpected relations are relentlessly investigated. This investigation never settles on any definition, but constantly exposes new forms of symbiosis. Aydın Teker succeeds in deconstructing the powerful meaning and the prevailing aesthetics of the instrument. It is about a variety of potential associations displayed and non-displayed.

This work consisting of a performer and a harp stands as a performative installation exposed on stage. The coupling of two distinct entities enhances the piece a sculptural quality with images of chimerical beauty. The conventional image of the harp as a static and two-dimensional object is overcome by shifting its plane and its vanishing points in a three-dimensional environment. Thus, each curve and line of the instrument is re-discovered in its geometrical design. The body is complementing the harp by filling its gaps in space. Thus, the robustness of the instrument is overturned by the malleability of the body.

The harp provides a territory for the performer. Balance and risk are again in play. The spectator contemplates a virtuosic relation of strength and control minutely worked out. And the hallucinatory symbiosis of the two, with the asymmetric articulation of the harp’s movement, generates images of chimerical creatures recalling the delicate gestures of a swan, a snail, or a mermaid, emitting most dramatic sounds.

harS, in its performative quality resembles an ‘art and science’ project, like the choreographer’s previous work aKabı. It creates phantasmic images of a mutant, not genetically but rather physically and kinetically engineered.

Aylin Kalem
Istanbul, 30 November 2007