A Tiny Cut in a Velvet Dress II – SPACE SEMANTICS
By and with: Julie-Anne Stanzak, Gesa Piper, Scott Jennings, Pawel Malicki, Martina La Ragione, Ophelia Young, Oleg Stepanov and Nathalie Larquet
SPACE SEMANTICS
A Tiny Cut in a Velvet Dress II – SPACE SEMANTICS
is an installative performance and a radical development of A Tiny Cut in a Velvet Dress, conceived within an analogue space marked by its apparent dissolution. Created for and performed at the Cubic Studios in Düsseldorf.
In FRAGILE SEMANTICS (The Poetics of Space), a choreographic and cinematic exploration continues — one that listens for presence, echo, and the sensory architecture of space. This project takes root in the work around A Tiny Cut in a Velvet Dress, a piece developed during the Corona pandemic in the suspended intimacy of an abandoned villa — a place that gradually revealed itself as stage, character, and partner in dialogue.
Inspired by Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, the project approaches space not as a neutral container, but as an emotional architecture. In the previous work, walls became mirrors, ceilings became echo chambers. The space responded. The villa taught that choreography can inscribe itself not only in the body, but also in surfaces, in dust, in silence. This work is about listening to such spaces — not as mere settings, but as co-performers.
This new phase extends the exploration of fragile semantics — how body, image, and sound create a language beyond words. The piece works with cinematic compositions (in wide and close shots), with carefully sculpted sound textures, and with the minimalist and poetic articulation of the living body. Central to this is the precision of articulation — not in a normative sense, but as an intuitive congruence between body and image, between presence and its projection.
The scenography remains light and adaptable: translucent curtains, mobile light rods, ephemeral frames for movement. The architecture must remain permeable — breathing, shifting — like memory itself. These elements have the capacity to transform any space into a spatial poem, into a chamber of resonance for human presences and their absences.
In collaboration with the dancers and artists who developed a striking poetic language in A Tiny Cut in a Velvet Dress, this new phase will explore how this intuitive expressiveness — this way of “being seen by the space”, as one performer put it — might unfold in new environments. The body, as conceived here, carries places within it — it is itself a container of landscapes, of losses, of porous boundaries.
This research phase will also experiment with hybrid analogue-digital forms: immersive installations, live performance, projected architectures. The work may unfold in a theatre, a black box, a gallery, or an abandoned building — it is precisely this architectural ambiguity that draws the project forward.
Fragile Semantics is ultimately a work about the echo of being — about how presence is carved in time and space, about the poetic tension between closeness and distance, between intimacy and disappearance.
This is not merely a continuation.
It is a return to the beginning —
to the place where space speaks,
and the body listens.
Sponsors & Supporters
Supported by the NATIONAL PERFORMANCE NETWORK – STEPPING OUT, funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media as part of the NEUSTART KULTUR. Hilfsprogramm Tanz, the Kulturbüro Wuppertal and with the kind support of Christian Baierl – Renaissance Immobilien AG and specials thanks to Matthias Louis
