THE HAMMER WITHOUT A MASTER

Fifty years later, Florin Flueraș and Brynjar Åbel Bandlien take the original work up again, and give birth to the re-enactment of The Hammer without a Master which brings together past intentions and present day understanding of art, society and human condition. The Hammer without a Master was too modern then and it is too contemporary now”. The Hammer without a Master is The Romanian Dance History.

“The work is concerned with the process of exaggerating the history and the need of creating great values in the past. It’s about how the institutions can transform something scandalous at that time, in something tamed and “valuable”, while possibly disregarding equivalent attitudes and works in the present. Sanda Agalides, the former wife of Stere Popescu, said that this remake was done “in the spirit of Stere” by managing to scandalize a good part of Romanian dance community who expected a formal and reverential reenactment of the piece. In a way this is a modern gesture towards a modern work. A reenactment of the performativity of the Hammer, not of its content,” testifies Florin Flueraș.

Florin Flueraș and Brynjar Åbel Bandlien accomplished the re-enactment of The Hammer without a Master performance in 2009 as part of What to affirm, what to perform / charting the invisible history program and successfully reproduced it in 2015 in the Time Dance Connection. Bucharest in action CNDB project.

What to affirm, what to perform/ charting the invisible history is a long- term program that took two years to complete, organised by Tanzquartier Wien and the National Centre for Dance Bucharest (CNDB), the Centre for Drama Art Zagreb and Maska Magazine – Ljubljana, in cooperation with Allianz Kulturstiftung. The program was born out of the need to retrieve and understand the choreographic and performative history from geographical spaces such as Austria, Croatia, Romania or Slovenia, going through the intense and difficult labour of retrieving the “invisible” history, “hidden” in archives, in public, and mainly in private libraries, and from the subjective memories of the few existent witnesses.

Florin Flueraș (http://www.fflueras.ro)
In his recent works, Unexperiences, States of Space and Collapse Yoga, Florin uses performative practices that affect the implicit attitudes and emotions of formalized art events, operating on the automatisms of having an experience. More than presenting something to the aesthetic capacities of an audience, he is interested in how the affecting of those capacities becomes the work. He is also interested in the “artworlds” in which his work appears. Artworlds are small scale art worlds – complex compositions of people, concepts, processes, capacities, frames. They can be presented as events, products, performances, concepts, practices, processes… They can take different forms in different contexts, and they still maintain their internal chaotic coherence of a world. Black Hyperbox, Unsorcery, Artworlds, Postspectacle, Clinic Artworld are some of these “artworks as artworlds” developed and presented in the last years.

Brynjar Åbel Bandlien
Brynjar trained ballet in his native Norway (1991-1993) and at the Hamburg Ballet (1993-1995). After his graduation, Bandlien worked for three years as a dancer at the Dutch company NDT2 in Den Haag, Holland, with which he toured Europe, the US and South-Afrika. In 1998 he started to work as a freelance dancer and choreographer in Scandinavia, Europe and the US. Bandlien worked with artists such as Manuel Pelmus, Jennifer Lacey, Phillip Gehmacher, Vera Mantero, Raimund Hoghe, Florin Flueraș, Heather Kravas and Antonija Livingstone. In the period 2004-2010 Bandlien was based in Bucharest (Romania) and took part in the development of the National Centre for Dance Bucharest (CNDB.) Bandlien is currently doing a PhD as a research fellow at Oslo National Academy of the Arts-Department Dance in Norway. Since 2010 he has been based between Oslo and Berlin.