Anthology is a dynamic skipping piece.

A group of skippers ventures on stage to create an energetic vortex that warps more than a decade’s popular images, dance styles and musical genres. With songs straight out of YouTube and athletic choreographic scores, they propel audiences into a vigorous transit and a celebratory ride.  

 

Based on annual mashup songs of popular music and weaving through (inter)generational references,

Anthology examines and showcases pop culture as folkloric rhythm and an intelligence of survival and thriving. With nods to video-clips and gym culture, the atmosphere of the piece provokes reflection on moving forward and being in movement as an untangling of history and incessant vitality. Endurance routines and overpowering music transform the stage into an arena of movement, an ice-skating rink and a ballroom in which dance histories emerge and disperse. While we experience the vulnerability and strength of the body, skipping ultimately becomes the common thread for a variety of footwork techniques and dance moves that are showcased in a fast and continuous rhythmic flow.

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Pop Anthologies

The inspiration for this piece stems from a musical idiom that gained momentum around the 2010s. Annual pop music collections started appearing on YouTube and were meant to celebrate the best songs of the year. A successor to the Top Hits CDs and a form of medleys, pop anthologies and megamixes are mashups that encapsulate elements of a large number of songs (80 - 150) in a 6 - 10 minute track. The result distorts the songs' origins and creates a hybrid space of disorientation. Within movement and transit, meanings and signifiers melt in a commemoration of recent heritage. Annual anthologies reflect the past decade, while monumentalizing the power of moving forward. Through skipping, Anthology proposes a practice of moving within an overload of information, in a rapidly changing society that is driven by exhaustion.

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Song sample: Pop Danthology 2014

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The Skipping Trilogy – methodology and characteristics

Andreas has been skipping since 2017 and created successful skipping pieces such as the duet The City and the group piece Tremble. Until now, his pieces have brought the minimal, hypnotizing and formal aspects of skipping to the foreground. For Anthology, formality remains but an extravagant expression of the practice is introduced with elaborate footwork and hand articulation. Instead of a sustained cadence, Andreas will follow the dramaturgy of the mash-up songs for a turbulent and surprising twist of rhythms and tempos. He will use his musical background to approach the tracks as the partiture. Treating pop music as if it was a classical composition, he will focus on the arrangement and synthesis, harmony and dissonance, between skipping and the musical structures. All to disclose the encompassing joy and resilience of the body.