Rehearsal pictures: © Caroline Minjolle Steps 2022

ABOUT RUNthrough

The starting point of "RUNthrough" is a wide variety of encounters and research by CocoonDance with different “bodies”:  dancers meet rapper, actors, folklore and sport clubs and voguing community. 

A project in which choreographic styles intermingle to create a fascinating composition that combines a plurality of body languages. Creative experiments with movement have emerged from the joint research of four workshops with multiple performative universes: the energy of the Kud Kolo troupe, the vivacity of the rappers Kamau & the Wolf, the voluptuousness of the voguers of The Iconic Kiki House of Juicy Couture and the sensitivity of the artists of Theater Hora. 

The gestural material collected during these residencies becomes a source of inspiration. On stage, eight dancers and a live DJ translate and transform them into a strange and innovative language. The fusion of these influences generates a liberating flow that flows over the audience, supported by the beats of musician Franco Mento. The performance creates a surprising perception of the body in motion.

PRESS CLIPPINGS

I don't think there is one way to describe this dance, but rather that each viewer has made their own journey through the piece, seeing things and feeling emotions without perhaps even being able to find words for it! I've seen bodies, I've seen souls, I've seen horses, moths and locusts, puppets on loose strings, lost souls, group power, fragility, empowerment, poetry, quest, new worlds, amazement. Everything is constantly evolving, each body always ready to transform, but always remaining true to oneself. Bodies which throughout the performance never stopped pulsating. (Serena Bonetti, Il Bernina, 17.05, 2022)

The fusion of numerous influences unleashed an intoxicating energy that carries away the audience and lets them experience a new kind of motion perception.

(Enrica Praolini, IL Grigione Italiano, 19.05.2022)

Suddenly, I had the feeling that the stage was now coming towards us like a wave. It rotates - as a globe. Fish! They are fishes. Dancing fish people. Everyone is in the water or did this really look like a starfish dance? ...  I think they love Rock 'n' Roll. Rock planet CocoonDance! (HORAkel, Gianni Blumer, Robin Gilly, Theater Hora, Zurich)

In Morges: The Burning Cauldron of Urban Dances (title) - Seductive, this RUNthrough? Yes, at least in spirit. Faithful to their method, Rafaële Giovanola and her team met other artists, in many different languages. They have stocked up on sounds and images. This is how they became familiar with voguing, this street dance where you strike a pose like on the fashion catwalks. Game of postures. This carnival, grandiloquent and ironic, outraged to the point of the grotesque and provocative, which is the subject of RUNthrough. Eight technically remarkable dancers made this loot bear fruit. Faces cut into the night. The breasts rise and fall in a cascading fashion. These men and women are waves. They swell and hollow, caught in a shock wave that never stops spreading. Suddenly, a horde of excavated rushes at you, knees bent, tribal torsos. Later, they will fall, arching like bows, and rise again like on a trampoline.

So why is it not convincing then? Because these polished images are not enough to hide the absence of a universe. Because we seek the uniqueness of an artistic gesture, only to find a show of force – whereas voguing is by nature libertarian. … RUNthrough is an honorable show. It is formatted to please. The cauldron of urban dances seemed to promise other uprisings. (Alexandre Demidoff,

LE TEMPS, 20. 05.2022)

CocoonDance presents at the Viktoriabad (a former public baths) the impressive creation "Runthrough" [Title] - In the performance, which was celebrated by the audience, one sees folkloric dance patterns, athletic sprints through the pool or bended bodies bouncing back like steel springs. Then, shortly after they are sliding backwards on all fours across the floor. ... It is not always possible to identify with absolute accuracy the origin of the respective movement phases from the piece. But that doesn't even matter. In this regard, "Runthrough" successfully continues CocoonDance's journey of integrating foreign movement techniques into modern dance, in productions like "Momentum", "Vis Motrix", "Hybridity" and most recently "Standard". A visionary work. (Bernhard Hartmann, Bonner General-Anzeiger, 09/16/2022)

Breathtaking premiere at "Move" [title] - This was a fantastic, exciting kick-off of the 21-day festival for modern dance in Krefeld. With "Runthrough'' the CocoonDance company provided pure thrills at the "Move" (festival) in the Heeder factory. ... By this term, the Bonn company manifests an openness to permanent change and expansion. ... The ensemble is breathtakingly artistic in its interpretation of movements which seem familiar, because they are reminiscent of hopping and running, of the buzzing in a beehive, of a flash mob, of timid approaches to strangers and frenzied ecstasy. All is in flow, barely traceable - just now a slow-motion like weightlessness, in the next moment a twitching spreads from body to body, as if someone had touched a power socket. (Petra Diederichs, Rheinische Post, 09/27/2022)

CocoonDance enthralls the audience at the opening of move! [title] -  "RUNthrough" makes you at times hold your breath; sometimes it’s rather rippling. There is nothing fluffy casual about it, and the dance is also rarely fluid. It thrives on tensions. It distributes them to certain body parts, so that they push back and forth, buckle, bounce up, turn, jerk, bend and flex, and this is repeated over and over again... For several years CocoonDance, alias Rafaële Giovanola and dramaturge Rainald Endraß, has been creating such pieces, where the dance steps are not predefined, but types of movement, phases, and sequences. The quality depends largely on the dancers, who perform –jointly developed– tasks and fill them with intention, without compromising the principles. (Melanie Suchy, tanzweb.org, retrieval: 09/19/2022)

CocoonDance, around choreographer Rafaële Giovanola and dramaturge Rainald Endraß, continues with its current production convincingly a series whose paradigms have already characterized their work for several years; and this performance now adds another powerful episode to the aesthetic experiences of the local audience, reflecting the current style of the company. On this evening, the spectators encountered at the same time a very pure kind of dance art, reduced to the body, to the movement, tension and relaxation, rehearsed patterns and improvisation, structure and unstructure. Movement art in its purest form, without many reference points, so to speak. ... That is fascinating. But at the same time demanding, uncompromising in its intensity; this extremely physical aesthetic experience is by no means lyrical or even enraptured, neither does it wish to be. (Christian Oscar Gazsi Laki, Westdeutsche Zeitung, 09/26/2022)

The Cocoondance Company has created with "RUNthrough III" a fascinating production [Header]

A "choreographic remix" at the Regensburg Dance Days which simultaneously inspires and unsettles. ... This is a fantastic play, as if from a surreal graphic novel whose actual story upon each approach ultimately eludes any interpretation. One can deduce ecological salvation narratives as well as the dawning of dystopian developments. ... The "choreographic remix", which Rafaële Giovanola developed together with the members of the ensemble,

encourages an associative diversity that likewise fascinates and disturbs. What counts in the end, is the power and energy of the collective togetherness, danced by a diverse ensemble of technically and artistically magnificent dancers. It is therefore worthwhile to continue to stare open-mouthed at the emptied stage - because hordes of ghostly figures continue to dance, even when Franco Mento's exceptional music has long faded away. (Michael Scheiner, retrieval: 24.11.2022, www.tanznetz.de)

Bonn’s award-winning CocoonDance Company is searching for unexplored movements, for unique ways of coping with the body. For its latest work, "RUNthrough III", the ensemble met in the run-up with classical Indian dancers. The result is an energetic, exhilarating evening. ... "RUNthrough III" is the third edition of a collaborative work series that began in August 2021. Each time, Giovanola and Endraß invited groups from different movement contexts to rehearse with them for one week. "RUNthrough" means an uninterrupted rehearsal of a performance, and the open-minded, fluid and organic attitude is instilled in the evening: Each of the dancers has certain improvisation tasks, must invent the transitions by oneself, andeven the live musician is improvising. No performance will ever be the same. Perhaps this is what makes the evening so full of energy and intoxicating that the spectator can hardly resist but to swing along?

(Dorothea Marcus, kritik-gestalten.de, retrieval:01/27/2023)

Bouncing in blue - Opening of the festival tanz nrw 2023 in Mühlheim an der Ruhr - The CocoonDance company from Bonn opens this year's festival edition with "RUNthrough III". [Header] ... The production "RUNthrough III" was preceded for four one-week research phases in which the company worked with experts from the fields of voguing, Serbian folkloric dance, rap and inclusive theater. In the performance, the roots of these traditions become visible: the complex rhythmic footwork, the recurring circle element in changing execution, and the vibrating chest seem inspired by Serbian folklore, while some floor elements and hand placements come from voguing. At the same time, they unite to form a consistent movement language that is peculiar to the company, characterized especially by the precise establishment of a movement element, which is then gradually transformed in (sometimes surprising but nevertheless) subtle shifts. The hour-long play of rhythms between the dancers and Franco Mento's sound forms a driving basis for the performance. (Tamora Dinklage, tanznetz.de, 06.05.2023)

... We are forced into a completely different kind of concentration by the Bonn-based company Cocoon Dance, who came to the Kunstfest for the third time to fascinate the National Theatre, which was unfortunately far from sold out. "Runthrough" is the name of Rafaële Giovanola's choreography from 2022, now available in several versions, meaning a run-through and a theatre rehearsal. The eight dancers, five women and three men, dressed in indigo-coloured but by no means uniform costumes, also walk, run and jump, but on the spot. They move in different ways, for example on their heels and buttocks. This locates the dance beyond the dance, in seemingly alien movements that bundle the diversity of species into one, as it were. Breasts thrust forward, shoulders back, heads shift on torsos that are conspicuously often pulled back and down. A living sculpture that vibrates and trembles to the pulsating sounds of live DJ Franco Mento, oscillating between techno rhythms and archaic drum rituals. It all points to nothing more than the human body itself. It examines it and celebrates it without paying homage to it. It goes on for an hour, but we could only watch for hours. (Michael Helbing, Thüringer Allgemeine, 10.09.2023)