Étant
Selected for Desassossego Short Dance Film Festival Desassossego Short Dance Film
Festival, Porto, Portugal, 2025 and International Dance Film Festival, Tokyo, 2026
We live in strange times of simultaneity, in which news, misinformation,
catastrophes, innovations, art, politics, affection, dislike, knowledge, ignorance,
boredom, stress, overwork, understimulation, beauty, and ugliness coexist
simultaneously, waging a struggle for supremacy. At the center of it all is culture,
without which we humans would be mere animals. And the one thing that
distinguishes us is the first thing to be cut back in times of crisis. And where crises
follow one another, where every day seems like déjà vu, I try to escape back into
culture, the last space of contemplation, the space where drawing strength was
once a precious commodity – which now either overflows with offerings and
consuming crowds and no longer offers private space in public, or is overwhelmed
with meaningless emptiness. The stage is still being used, but the audience has
long since stayed home, watching Netflix.
The concept of being (étant) has the broadest possible scope of meaning because it can
refer to everything conceivable. Movement is therefore being, being is movement. Étant
asked how movement or dance can be documented, archived, or filmed? How can the
perspective space be opened up during the filming process when moving out of the
theater, before the film is returned to a perspective-fixed state, equated with the theater,
during presentation? The eight-minute short film is a black-and-white collage of
performative recordings with Karen Bößer, created in 2006, 2023/24/25. The footage
served as a moving point for the productive process of critical exchange of editing ideas
with the artist Dirk Dietrich Hennig, which culminated in the present film.
A Karen Bößer and Dirk Dietrich Hennig film
Art director: Karen Bößer & Dirk Dietrich Hennig
Performance and choreographie: Karemn Bößer
Final editing: Dirk Dietrich Hennig
Camera: Dirk Dietrich Hennig, Susanne Diesner, André Wenzel
Found footage: Prelinger Archives
Music: Ansgar Tappert
Catchfish films, 2025
Yuasa Productions
Produced in Germany in 2025
