COMMON GROUND, 2022

Common Ground, Full HD_Video, 27:49 min., Berlin 2022
Contept / Artistic Direction: Nicole Wendel
Performance: Sigal Zouk, Jan Burkhardt, Nicole Wendel
Soundcomposition: Ruth Wiesenfeld
Camera / Editing: Max Hilsamer
Sound Mastering: Elias Hamman

With the great support of INITIAL Akademie der Künste Berlin

Common Ground is a film about drawing and the encounter of a physical versus an architectural sonic structure. Three dancers and a cameraman listen into the interior of one of Berlin’s oldest churches, the Parochialkirche, located in the center of the city. The visual language follows the movement of the bodies, which bear witness to its fields in an exploratory manner and reorder the space through dialogical resonances. At the same time, they listen into their own body-space universe and allow each other to take effect. What is the subtle difference between listening and hearing, seeing and perceiving? Or: what can it mean when the ear hears, the eye sees, the skin feels, and at the same time the entire organism of the individual reacts directly to the other and in this interplay a new larger organism might be created? Like antennaes, the dancers lean through the material in a constant callibration of their own scale into the place and let a common emotional geometry grow out of it. While sound fields of the city influence the interior of the church, new sound structures become audible and weave themselves into a sensitive composition of the inside and the outside. An echo from the here and now emerges that rewrites and redraws the space. The perception of time sinks into the moment and becomes vertical. What do we understand? Where are we going from here? Who or what is receiving?