Moving in November festival has invited Angela Schubot and Jared Gradinger to Helsinki for a residency supported by Goethe-Institut Finnland and German Federal Foreign Office. In this residency Schubot and Gradinger will work on a project which will be part of the festival’s next two editions. 

Angela Schubot is a dancer, artist, choreographer, researcher and bodyworker-healer based in Berlin with roots in Peru and Canada. Jared Gradinger is a choreographer, artist, performer and gardener born in the USA and based in Berlin since 2002. Schubot and Gradinger first worked together in 2002 under the direction of Constanza Macras. Already then they discovered a strong connection and common interest in purely physical yet very dynamic movement languages. They started to combine physical practices with philosophical and even esoteric discourse. The topic for their collaboration was the debordering of the body and starting point was the search for an unconditional togetherness to escape from one’s own identity. From 2009 until 2013, they have created 4 full-length works: What they are instead of (2009), Is maybe (2012), Dying together and I hope you die soon (2013) and All my holes are theirs (2013).

Schubot/Gradinger’s desire to acknowledge and interact with non-human beings and open up their unconditional togetherness to the non-human realm and brought into a deep immersion with plants and nature. Since 2017, they have been ‘co-creating’ performances with Nature. These works are a sensitive plea for the dissolution of the human-nature dichotomy and an attempt of a hierarchy-free co-existence through real encounters and radical experimentation. In 2018 they co-created YEW and YEW:outside. In these duets they immersed themselves deeply in Nature and its inherent intelligence. In 2019, they continued the adaptation and premiered with YEW:Kids, which offers very young children intimate encounters with plant nature.