Conversation between Katerina Andreou and Kerstin Schroth about SHOUT TWICE

You are both choreographers and have created your own performances independently from each other. You both have a strong recognisable movement language. You got to know each other recently and started working together. SHOUT TWICE is the first creation that you are signing together. How did you meet, and how was the idea for this performance born?

A very dear artist and friend of both of us, Maud Blandel, proposed to each of us to meet. Back then I (Katerina) was looking for performers for a new creation, my first group piece Bless This Mess. The first meeting was in a studio where we danced together in order to see if the collaboration in this frame could happen; we both instantly felt that there is an affinity and a fluidity in the way we were improvising and imagining while dancing together. It was what we might call a match. And we felt that this is rare. After Bless This Mess, I needed to continue and explore more this kinship that we both felts and I invited Melissa to create a duo together, to invent a place and a time just for us, as an intimate territory without any hierarchy of roles, in order to extend our meeting, tune more and as we both said: amplify one another.

It made sense only if we were co-authors, meaning jumping into the unknown and holding this responsibility and joy that comes along with the work together. This is how Shout Twice started, from this kinship that we felt rare and full of potential for our artistic paths and relationship.

I am curious about two strong elements in the performance: the sound and its creation, and the decision to perform on a small platform, surrounded by the audience on all four sides – without any escape possible from their gaze.

The sound is let’s say the primary element, even the base, of our performative momentum. Sound for us is an extension of the body and vice versa. And our negotiation inside the process, our dialogue was very much related to sound and the imaginative or sensorial potential: we started with trying to describe our needs as sounds. We often use one remarkable scene from the film Memoria, where Tilda Winston tries to describe to a sound engineer a loud sound that only she can listen to – nobody else. This effort, this negotiation to describe something interior, something intimate, or even filtered collective, touched and inspired us a lot. We felt that the shout, in its high but also very low frequencies, made sense as a territory to explore, per formatively, conceptually, intuitively and most importantly not literally. We explored music, sound making, dancing, even our own coexistence on stage as different kinds of shouting, coloured with anger or joy or both.

The shout has also the emotional frontality or direct address that we needed to somehow keep intact, we decided very soon the configuration of a kind of concert. Where everybody is inside the space, where we can be seen and lost sometimes, where people will be standing in order to feel the vibration and yet expose them to the intimacy that our dance and relationship holds. We thought that the amplification in the sense of empowerment would operate better in a 360 degrees configuration, with a small territory for us to occupy and a bigger territory around us to contaminate.

In SHOUT TWICE, the scream becomes a driving force for joy, playfulness, and resilience. Could you say more about this in relation to how you perceive our world today?

As we said, scream for us is a tool, and we imagined it in different ways, as abstract sometimes as possible. It stays through an action and a reaction depending on its nature. So we can find as the cause of that screaming, of SHOUT TWICE, the way our bodies and minds react to actual reality in this world, but we also use it in order to get creative, to play and to find meaning still. So it behaves as a paradigm, as both sides of the same coin. SHOUT TWICE is a collection of our screams in a larger sense, where we oscillate from joy to pain, from pain to joy, throughout a dramaturgy that was led from a lot of playfulness and resilience during the process. We guess this oscillation is our way to keep on dancing, keep on making, keep on in general.