Sonja Augart

Performer and choreographer Sonja Augart is the driving force behind Fragmenta. In 1992, she left Germany to study modern dance in The Netherlands. She played in numerous pieces, created dozens of choreographies and performances and toured the world for ten years with Jérôme Bel’s The Show Must Go On. In 2013 she settled in Berlin, where she works at the Uferstudios GmbH, Theater Sophiensaele and Tanz Büro Berlin. Current projects include Choreographier Dich Pfad, Mapping Dance and Choreographic Radio.

Augart’s main concern is perhaps the same as any artist’s: how to see things in a new light? We are taught to see the world in a specific way and it is surprisingly hard to break free of preconceived structures of meaning and reality. To Augart, the answer lies within the playful body that rediscovers its ability to learn all by itself. The body makes it possible to be material and immaterial at the same time: energy, form, emotion and personality in relationship to the world around it. For dance and movement-based performances this translates into a research of the space where you are and how far your presence extends into this space, and into the question of what happens when your self encounters other people’s selves.

Looking for alternative ways to perceive a situation creates moments of great uncertainty. Whether you end up here out of curiosity or because the old order no longer supports you, makes little difference: you don’t know where things are heading and you wouldn’t know how to get there. What does it take to endure this tense phase of suspension? How to take a step in the direction of the unknown and start to move forward? How do you see something that is not yet visible? In dance or in society – in life in general – this moment where we don’t have the answers, where we don’t know how to move on, is crucial.

In Augart’s work the search for the essential collides with an experimental setup that varies input, form and time. The audience is part of this setup and their position is redefined with each new experimental arrangement. The spectator is part of the whole.