Unseen Horses

Text by Natalie Broschat

What does life sound like? In the dance piece »Unseen Horses«, the focus is on the diverse personalities of the DTH dancers, their private and professional challenges, and the wonderful moments of joy in their lives. The audience does not merely watch them move; they get to know them on a deeper level—quite literally—through video projections on a large screen. To achieve this, choreographer Ioanna Paraskevopoulou immersed herself in their lives with a camera, stopping at nothing, not even the bathroom or uncomfortable questions.

What makes this piece unique is that the dancers of Dance Theatre Heidelberg create sounds for their own cinematic lives in the style of Foley artists. Foley artists are professional sound designers whose name traces back to Jack Foley (1891–1967), a pioneer of cinematic sound who developed his technique in the late 1920s in the USA. A 1979 Canadian documentary short film affectionately refers to Foley artists as the »Unseen Heroes of Movie Sound«. Whether it’s the creaking of shoes on wood or the rustling of fabric—all these sounds are later recreated in the studio on a synchronized audio track. Anything that makes noise is used to breathe acoustic life into film images.

For »Unseen Horses«, she collaborated with set designer Marilena Kalaitzantonaki and musician and sound designer Aliki Leftherioti to create a multisensory and microphoned sound laboratory full of surprises. On an octagonal wooden platform divided into 17 compartments and covered with wooden panels, various materials and everyday objects are arranged, waiting to be used. »Because of the different ways we perceive image and sound, sound must be continuous, whereas images are captured as individual frames. Sound requires the dimension of time. With film, time can be stretched or compressed, but sound can only exist in its ›real‹ time—it cannot be stretched or compressed.« The dancers must therefore use the many objects on stage in real time to generate the sound for their own lives.

Here, the stage is not just a resonating body but also a playground. In one scene, for example, the dancers reference the aesthetic and brutal reality of the so-called dance marathons in the USA—competitions during the Great Depression in the 1930s, where people danced for weeks, often out of desperation and hopelessness. The 1969 film »They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?« by Sydney Pollack—based on Horace McCoy’s 1935 novel—is a key inspiration for Ioanna Paraskevopoulou. The film portrays the relentless hardship and abyss of such dance marathons and reminds her of the lives of freelance dancers, who often struggle from one project to the next. With »Unseen Horses«, Paraskevopoulou not only honours the art of Foley but also the dedication and perseverance of each individual dancer.