Creamcake returns to Tropez’s three-month art program at Sommerbad Humboldthain, taking up residence across two Sunday afternoons in July from 2-6pm. The Berlin-based interdisciplinary platform brings together artists whose works move across intimacy, embodiment, fiction, and sound. Each afternoon unfolds as a program of performance, live music, and DJ sets—set against the backdrop of an open-air public pool, where bodies gather, undress, and move.
On July 5, Teo Ala-Ruona presents “Play Overlay,” a dance for the unnameable self that, in everyday life, is translated into roles through the act of coding ourselves with clothing. The collaboratively developed solo performance asks how our everyday roles can be shaped—and how they can slip away again. The work choreographs the friction between the body’s internal experience and the external layers worn on top of it, framing clothing as a technology that can be applied and discarded layer by layer.
Undressing roles turns into a moment of collective attention and renegotiation, as the audience becomes part of a shared gesture of dressing and undressing: a collective play of decoding through clothes. The public swimming pool is an apt stage—a space where the body is already in a state of continuous modulation, between wet and dry, covered and uncovered, seen and obscured, and where notions of clothing and exposure are already negotiated.
The day continues with a live set from Eddington Again, whose left-field soul with pop sensibilities explore human experience and spirituality through their timeless in the pocket electronic tracks, and a DJ set by Larry. Between performance, live sound, and DJ set, the afternoon moves through states of stripping back, from the inherited to the improvised, from the poolside to the floor.
On July 19, Barnett Cohen presents “tactics of practice,” created in collaboration with artist and composer Shamica Ruddock and dancer Sally Butin. The work is a collective summoning of the tension between withholding and reveal, pleasure and discord, space and place, emerging through the sustaining and slippage of sound and gesture over time. Underscored by nightlife stimuli, it interlaces landscapes of thought, wavelengths of mood, and the body in non-stop/stop motion into a performance of excess, constituted by erotics of force and aggression where expenditure extends beyond sonic and corporeal forms.
The afternoon also features the performance “Heartmode Tsiftetelli“ by Krista Papista, whose Euro Divas unfolds through and ceremonies for inhabiting many bodies, daring to rewrite biography with luxurious audacity, and a DJ set by Character DJ. Here, excess and spectacle spill from stage into water: the body as a site of invention, ceremony, and rave.
Credits
Teo Ala-Ruona: Play Overlay
Concept, direction, performance: Teo Ala-Ruona
Choreography: Pauliina Sjöberg
Sound design: Tuukka Haapakorpi
Costume design: Ervin Latimer
Production: Sanna Ritvanen
Commissioned: James Taylor-Foster and ArkDes in collaboration with MDT as part of Worldglimpsing: Roleplay and Design of Alternate Realities
Supported by: Zodiak: Center For New Dance, Frame Contemporary Art Finland and Arts Promotion Centre Finland
Berlin presentation supported by the Finnland-Institut.
