45 min.

DescriptionInterviewFurther Reading And Viewing

“Part of what makes the piece so astonishing is its steady stream of surprises. . . . It’s intimate and lovely and physically idiosyncratic, a beautiful ending to an astounding piece.” Rebecca Jacobson, Willamette Week

“I don’t want to impose a certain message or concept. Rather, the relationship between the people onstage can just unfold in a rich and personal way.” Pieter Ampe of Still Standing You

[or] Still supporting you.

[or] Still bearing you.

[or] Still standing for you.

[or] Still standing with you.

[or] Still standing.

[or] Just still

Meet Pieter and Gui. Pieter. Gui.

Two dancers play out scenes of male friendship, machismo, and the naked male body in this mischievous dance, a kaleidoscopic view of friendship—rife with tensions and aggressions, clumsy desires of harmony and virtue, whispered tunes of togetherness and solitude. Still Standing You is a daring, hilarious dance work that travels from the aggressive to the intimate, and the forms two bodies create.

With a dance idiom entirely their own Pieter and Gui shamelessly, and mischievously, seek out what they mean to each other. Are they friends, partners, lovers, rivals or even enemies? The only instruments they can use are their own bodies: displays of muscle, the intensity of their boyish friendship, the capacity to turn one’s limitations into virtuosity and the ability to combine all this into a dynamic performance in which ruggedness, anger, and love are entwined in one great physical and all-encompassing embrace.

After developing Still Difficult Duet in 2007, Guilherme Garrido and Pieter Ampe continued exploring the ambiguous desire of choreographing a human relationship. Knowing that relationships are both indistinguishable mixtures of recognizable shapes and patterns and random feelings, these two boyish men—that can as well be friends, partners, lovers, contestants or even possible enemies—put their body at work to discover the different layers of physical complicity.

Star Producers David and Linda Glickstein

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Interview with Pieter Ampe and Guilherme Garrido

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Further Reading and Viewing

In Conversation With Pieter Ampe by Sarah Rose Leonard, CultureBot Maximum Performance.

Excerpt:

When I first met Gui in Portugal I was amazed by his colorfulness and creative flow. I wanted to make a piece that celebrates the colorfulness of our relationship and friendship. We thought if we embraced our meeting, then meaning would arrive itself. For me that’s still my main way of looking at the making of work. I don’t want to impose a certain message or concept. Rather, the relationship between the people onstage can just unfold in a rich and personal way. People always question if we are a couple, but there is no thought around that. Still Standing You became a animalistic male thing. It’s not about the question of what we are.

Read the full interview

Interested in other dance performances by Ampe and Guilherme? Watch this short video from A Coming Communtity by Pieter Ampe and Guilherme Garrido, in addition to Hermann Heisig and Nuno Lucas.

WRITE BACK ATCHA!

thINKingDANCE will host three FREE post-performance “write-back” events after performances during the FringeArts festival this September. Write Back atcha is a post-show “talk-back” combined with a mini-writing workshop, where we will guide audience members through an exploration of the language they use to describe dance. Write Back atcha provides an opportunity for audiences to deepen their engagement with the work on view as well as hone their writing skills with mentored feedback. Questionnaires with simple prompts will be provided to all audience members before the show. Participating audience members’ responses will be collected after the workshop and collated into a crowd-sourced “review” of the performance, which will be published the next day on thINKingDANCE’s website.

Still Standing You Write-Back
After the September 9 Performance
Workshop Leaders: Kirsten Kaschock & Megan Bridge
RSVP on Facebook!