holding it together

Enchanting Incompleteness.

It’s not usual to be led to your seat in the theatre individually. By the actors. Holding your hands. Being welcomed. In darkness. Jessica Huber’s evening ‘holding it together’ starts exactly like this, momentarily elevating each audience member from the anonymous crowd. You sit on the stage arranged neatly like an army of milky-lit ghosts and wait until everyone has been brought to their seats. Pitch-blackness sets in, music starts... (...) Géraldine Chollet and Robert Stejin contest the final part. They recount how they met at a party, how they came to acquire their favourite clothes and why they like lying next to each other so much. At the same time they perform physical relaxation exercises, treatments and test, which parts of their bodies nestle into each other most comfortably. This loving directional pairing of stories and bodywork is the most beautiful part of the evening. Jessica Huber describes ‘Holding it together’ as a series of collaboration and performances, focusing on exchanges between different artists and sharing as a ritual. The project will continually evolve from the premiere. ‘Holding it together’ could seem slightly methodological, a bit unfinished. But not in this case. Firstly, because the performers always know precisely what they are doing. And secondly, because the evening is bestowed with exactly the certain kind of magic that occurs only with a pinch of unpredictability.

NZZ, Zürich, 28 May 2015, Isabelle Jakob 

holding it together - Solidarity (Zusammenhalt) as a creed

A Ritual of Exchange // Swiss dance- and theatre performer Jessica Huber is Gessnerallee's Young Associated Artist for three years. She has gathered collaborators from the most diverse artistic disciplines there. Their research and pieces can also be programmed individually, as Huber understands her performance-series as, in essence, an open form of work. This may sound like have-a-go amateurism, but she succeeds in conceptually combining the acts into a generous whole, into an evening dedicated to the ritual of exchange, of sharing. After ecstatic music in the darkness of the stage, during which everyone mentally paints their own trance images, German dancer Matthias Kleinschnittger hops and crashes with rhythmical finesse over the empty stage until he is breathless. Then from among the audience, a horde of collaborators, identifiable by similar leggings in the most glaring colours, takes over and drives the revue-pastiche to its climax.

Gentle intimacy / The highlight of the evening is the multi-layered duo of Geraldine Chollet and Robert Steijn. Two very different and differently old bodies nestle together, silent rituals of gentle intimacy. Two people explain, apparently quite privately, how they met at a party and worked with each other – one with, one without a plan – and what this resulted in. The Dutch performer with a penchant for Shamanism and the dancer from Lausanne offer each other a song, a dance and neither shy from really deep feelings, nor bodily nakedness...

As ironically broken the comments may be and although the emotions are played with understatement, they still manage to amaze – and touch. While Steijn presents a Mexican snake dance using two daggers, Chollet’s solo -- inspired by cows and the first encounter with Robert – reaches such levels of expression that you feel you are watching Mary Wigman, Rudolf von Laban or Monte Verità, all at the sam–

(Der Landbote, Winterthur, 30th May 2015, Evelyn Klöti)