Britta Lieberknecht founded with five dancers „Britta Lieberknecht & Company“ in 2013. The focus of their dance is the interpretation of classical and contemporary music. The pianist and lecturer for piano works, Laurenz Gemmer, participates as expert for music in the creation of the project.
In their first dance performance, Britta Lieberknecht & Company seek a dance and music dialogue with Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Clavierwerk” (works for piano). The ensemble approaches the beauty of this music with expressive imagery connecting the danced interpretation to ten vacuum cleaners which represent our daily life dominated by machines. At the beginning, there’s a paradox: What does Bach have to do with vacuum cleaners? From a seemingly crazy idea not only humor but also sense and sensuality emerge. Two epochs meet, similarity surfaces. For in the innovative baroque period, people were enthusiastic about machines and developed the base for today's art of engineering.

Vacuum cleaners are pictorially mounted on the gallery, their tubes reminding the organ of a church. Pure dance choreographies enter a dynamic and multifaceted dialogue with the complex elegance and depth of Bach’s music. When related to the music of J.S. Bach, a vacuum cleaner sounds surprisingly sophisticated and rich. The well known action of vacuum cleaning is transformed into ingenious imagery in the dances. Our addiction to machines is the background for often humorous scenic interpretations, driven to painfulness in one solo. Performed to Bach's music this addiction unveals its subtle character. Something new arises - how much more poetry is waiting to be discovered in the world of household goods?
Britta Lieberknecht dares a choreography that is precise and still winking. Fresh and outgoing, the company dances its rich movement vocabulary. Something timeless results from the friction between Bach's musical universe and the present: the joy of dance and music.

Kölnische Rundschau/choices.de

„Bach’s music, however, confers a particular, ironic charm to the silliness of monotonous machine noise, and the scenic contrasts of the production stress again and again the structural multiplicity of Bach’s music. Its mixture of playful vitality and strictness is being transposed by Britta Lieberknecht into consistently arranged group choreographies making the dancers act in lines like soldiers. The music carries grace into a world that is dominated by sounds of engines and in which we have to stand our ground against all kinds of arbitrary noise. In the end, the concept emits occasionally more intensity than the choreography which offers, in the last scene, to each of the five dancers the opportunity to improvise. Britta Lieberknecht offers a winking production whose acoustic background is inspiring and which, in an audacious way, makes everyday world the object of a dance experiment which longs for further development.”

Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger

„Out of a quiet interiorized dance and happily expelled limbs, a movement composition comes into being, a very contemporary reference to the old doctrine of affections, to the machine-like control of exuberance.”

Bergische Landeszeitung - Kölnische Rundschau/Rhein-Berg

„Even more exceptional indeed is the connection that the full-throated household appliance establishes with the Well-Tempered Clavier or with the Partita no. six in a dance performance. […] Every tiny chord, each purling in a piano phrase, each trailing off and falling silent can be read in the movements, and the handling of the profane device is turning into an organic game – at times poetical, at others luring-lascivious, then again funny in this somewhat cumbersome way that one knows from Lieberknecht’s choreographies. The way in which touching seriousness can evolve out of factual ridiculousness – unbeatable, this metamorphosis.“

www.revierpassagen.de

„That this is precise and playful dancing doesn’t remain concealed to anyone. First and foremost, the elaborate, depressingly funny solo by Photini Meletiadis will strongly be remembered.”

Press full version

www.choices.de/bach-und-das-akustische-monstrum
www.revierpassagen.de/21172/staub-aufwirbeln-mit-Bach/2013/029_1006