United Cowboys - YEAR OF CREATION 2019

2019 - A YEAR OF CREATION for United Cowboys

United Cowboys has developed so-called biotopes under the title Concept for new Development for many years. These artificial site-specific environments, in which dancers and musicians were embedded, questioned the conventional structure and duration of performance from within.

The audience had the ability to observe this world from all angles in its own pace, being able to walk around, being guided in its apparent freedom by the performers. The biotope usually lasted up to eight hours per occasion and has been presented in over seven countries in Europe.

This year United Cowboys decided to return to the theater stage with two new creations:

The monumental work The New Piece and the intimate solo performance This hurts a lot more than it used to do.

THE NEW PIECE

In The New Piece United Cowboys takes along their findings about (cultural) identity, about individuality and about generosity into a performance for and by four dancers associated to United Cowboys. Maarten van der Put and Pauline Roelants have both established their artistic signatures through their intrinsic expertise to channel the individual performer’s power and vulnerability. By merging four dancers with backgrounds in resp. Ballet, Urban, Modern Dance, Performative Physicality, United Cowboys is able to extracts the best out of this unique composition.

In The New Piece Maarten and Pauline will also be present on stage, as intermediary between dancers and audience. With live camera projections and inciting live soundscapes, they create parallel worlds, in which the exclusiveness of the individual dancer – his/her duende - is being augmented in a world of details and senses.

“With The New Piece we want to create a confirmative contradictory world in which the motionless, melancholic body meets the screaming world; and the expressive dancer meets a silenced nature“. –Maarten van der Put and Pauline Roelants

Concept: Maarten van der Put and Pauline Roelants

Created with- and performed by: Conor Doherty, Eulàlia Bergadà Serra, Marti Güell Vallbona, Florencia Martina

Live camera: Maarten van der Put | Live soundscapes: Pauline Roelants

THIS HURTS MORE THAN IT USE TO DO

This Hurts A Lot More Than It Used To is a solo performance in which Pauline Roelants re-calibrates her guts.

It represents a portrait of human searching, trying, often failing, and of the necessity to wander; without nostalgia, without melancholy, without transience; falling, rising and moving forward.

In the early stages of United Cowboys the performances mainly consisted of solos by Roelants accompanied by video’s of van Der Put and music composed by Rudi Roelants . They can be characterised as personal physical documents, that ‘boned out dance to the pith’.

Now, 15 years later, Roelants returns to that spring with her new solo This Hurts A Lot More Than it Used To - a one-on-one piece presenting a combination of performance, dance, sound, video and image, all produced by Roelants.

“In my younger days, I was quite a dare; high trees, running gallop; champion in turning on the climbing frame with no hands; nowadays, the fences seem too high to climb, let alone to jump over them and when I fall, the earth seems to perish.” –Pauline Roelants

Concept and performed by: Pauline Roelants

In dialogue with: Maarten van der Put

For more information or to start a conversation about creation, presentation, collaboration, please contact us directly via [email protected] or visit www.unitedcowboys.net