COMPANY
Today the ensemble surrounding Dusseldorf-based choreographer Ben J. Riepe consists of a fifteen-person-team. Numerous stage pieces as well as installative works have been created and toured internationally since the formation of the ensemble in 2004. “Happy End – dealing night again” and “amour espace”, the latter as a work-in-progress, have been presented at the ImpulsTanz Festival in Vienna in 2007. In 2008 the company realised the five-part-performance-series “Love, Death and the Devil”. Its second part “Image 2: The Dark Chamber” was presented on festivals in China in the context of Chin-A-Moves in 2008. The five parts of the series concluded in the stage piece “LOVE | DEATH | DEVIL – THE PIECE”, which toured through India and Bangladesh on occasion of the Goethe Institute South Asia`s fiftieth anniversary in 2009, and then was invited to the German Dance Platform in Nuremberg in 2010. In March 2009 the company was selected as one of four ensembles for the “Spitzenförderung”, a three-year basis funding by the Government of North-Rhine-Westphalia, and since June 2010 the group has their own production space in Dusseldorf. The stage pieces are being coproduced by tanzhaus nrw in Dusseldorf and House of Artists Mousonturm in Frankfurt.
The Ben J. Riepe Kompanie’s artistic works display a provocative poetics, drama and irony are closely intertwined and beauty has preserved its critical potential. Choreography is more than an arrangement of dancing bodies. Ben J. Riepe developed a wilful artistic language that is both uncompromising in its consequence and experimental in its search for new means and forms of expression. This creates compositions that combine multi-layered movement-images with self-reflexive references to the principle situation of theatrical performance. In the work of the Ben J. Riepe Kompanie choreography becomes an exploration of the emotional complexities of our contemporary reality.
B e n J. R i e p e
Kompanie
