The artistic performance "Between Heaven and Earth: Being" by Annabelle Wimmer Bakic is about the meaning of rocking for humans, as an everyday as well as ritual action. The swinging of the artist, the participants and the visitors creates community, cooperation and diversity in unity.
To be present means to stand at the ultimate point of being: full of perception, presence and intensity. This point is the interface between past and future. This is where everything is decided. The performance of the swing enables the experience itself - the joy, the momentum, the feeling of freedom. Perception opens up, because life means experiencing. This physical experience has become an important asset in an increasingly digitalized and virtual world.
The swinging opens one's own space, power and freedom become perceptible and stretch one's own limitations: thoughts become free, everyday life dissolves. A space of imagination and possibilities is created, which, by opening outwards (with the swing forward) and concentrating on the inner (with the swing backwards), settles as if by itself.
Above and below, heaven and earth, past and future are connected in the swing and become a flowing unity. In the joint swing, individual strength and collective community are not experienced as opposites but as poles of one's own being. Thus the swing becomes a symbol of connection, unity and becoming whole.
The performance "Between Heaven and Earth: Being" at the Alpine Spring Academy is about the question: where do I come from and where do I want to go? What do I bring with me and where am I going? What are my values and what are my potentials? These central questions are essential for the creative development of the Alpine region, because quality and value creation, innovation and future viability can and should be experienced as a unified process and go hand in hand, like the swings from HUTSCHNon which one swings in performance. Thus, the swing stands for development, creativity and growth. It becomes a symbol for a valuable and fruitful future.
Since time immemorial and all over the world, this meaning of swinging as a magical ritual can be found: like a red thread, it spins through the ages and the most diverse cultures of the earth. Everywhere with the same context of meaning. It can be found in the Alps, the Mediterranean, the Baltic, Eastern Europe, Siberia, Nepal, Thailand and India. A ritual to release the old, to bring about the new, to enable a good future, to emphasise the luminous and to release the binding.
The performance emphasises this cross-cultural aspect of swinging: traditional diversity and universal values become one: it is about the idea of unity in diversity, individual power for a community and the potential of connection and networking through communication.
Rocking is experienced as a collective value that may connect many levels. The performance thus becomes a universal language, a global means of communication, and art becomes a form of language that is able to connect the divisive and create awareness. Performance opens perception through experience and thus the space of consciousness, creativity and inspiration. These are the forces that have made man an extraordinary being and have determined human development since time immemorial. Performance has become a universal ritual. For to be or not to be is a question of one's own consciousness. Like a wanderer between people, worlds and times, Annabelle connects the different levels in the performance to superordinate human-collective values and brings them into the present through personal experience and communal experience.
TheBad Reichenhall Art Academy, founded in 1996 as a municipal institution, is one of the largest of its kind in Europe. Every year, around 1500 art enthusiasts from Germany, Austria, Switzerland and other countries attend the more than 140 courses given by up to over 100 artists in the spacious and well-equipped studios.
In an atmosphere characterised by openness and curiosity, the focus is on art in its many forms. The programme ranges from painting, drawing and graphics to sculpture, mixed media and artistic photography - and specials such as book art, land art and performance.
To measure the Alps aesthetically and dialogically, to invent new narratives for their development and thus to make them sustainable as a living space beyond the cliché zone and catalyst of longing: that is the goal of the creative alps academy.
As a cooperation between the Bad Reichenhall Art Academy and creativeALPS, it will be held for the first time in 2019.
In the montane-urban dialogue and at the interface of art, creative economies, crafts and regional development, a resonance space for rethinking alpine concerns is created. The project addresses "young alpine people" with different professional and biographical backgrounds: Philosophers, artists, architects, scenographers, designers. The creativealps academy takes place as a think & do project in cross-border cooperation with ARGE Kultur, the Literaturfest Salzburg and the Bergfilmfestival Salzburg.
The events of the creative alps academy take place in cooperation with the creativeALPS programme at ARGE Kultur Salzburg . There, in the medium of film, literature and music, the potentials of traditional and contemporary alpine culture for new concepts of a "good life" in the mountains will be explored in the field of tension between aesthetic, practical and cultural-theoretical expertise.
Further information can also be found on the blog of the Bad Reichenhall Art Academy.
