OUR FUTURE addresses the question of what we need to practise together in order to prepare for the future in the face of multiple crises. How can we encourage each other when we feel powerless?
Based on a joint research process with young people, the artistic team at new trouble asks: ‘What does it take to raise our voices despite unfair starting conditions and the power imbalance between generations in our society?’
OUR FUTURE is the third part of the interdisciplinary long-term choreographic project FUTURE RELATIONS (2023–2025), which sets out to explore sustainable relationships in times of escalating climate catastrophe. Scientific solutions are available, decisions and transformations are necessary, but still too little is being done.
From 2023 to 2025, Antje Velsinger & Team will therefore use artistic means to explore various alternative relationships, both with ecological resources and between generations. The aim is to work with young people and adults to design a transformation process that seeks ways of dealing with and overcoming the crisis. The entire concept for FUTURE RELATIONS is based on the following thesis: in order to find ways out of the ecological crisis and enable a future worth living for coming generations, we must stop focusing primarily on ourselves here and now. We must seek and develop practices and strategies here and now that will enable us to enter into SUSTAINABLE RELATIONSHIPS.
In the 2022/23 season, Antje Velsinger / new trouble in THEIR FUTURE explored the relationship to the future from the perspective of parents. In the format of a stage play, they staged the conflict between the parental need to protect and care for their own children and the knowledge that the world into which we release our children is not sufficiently protected by us adults and is increasingly being destroyed. The premiere took place on 22 and 23 September 2023 at Tanzhaus NRW, Düsseldorf.
In the performance GOODBYE/FAREWELL, which premiered on 18 October 2024 at Tanzfaktur Cologne, new trouble addressed the question of what we must say goodbye to in the face of the climate crisis. How do we learn to let go of old habits and illusions and say goodbye to them? Choreographic strategies of saying goodbye are interwoven with stories of loss and rituals that question humanity's place in the world. Three dancers repeatedly open up spaces in which grief can be allowed and shared. The audience is invited to enter these spaces together with the performers and to look for moments in which change begins.
