Bones is an immersive performance by the choreographer Fabrice Mazliah and the curator Claude Jansen. Together with a team of Namibian and German artists, they weave analogue, spiritual and digital media together to form a multisensory experience. Based on research into an ngoma drum looted from Namibia and the 8,000-year-old bones of a shaman kept in Germany, BONES draws attention to the knowledge inherent in bones and how people are connected to their surroundings and their ancestors. Supported by AR (Augmented Reality) goggles and digital sound modulation, the performers create liminal spaces between science and speculation, performance and ritual, mankind and matter. A landscape of bodies and sounds is generated in which the rhythms of heartbeats, drums, birds and trees merge. Bones invites the audience to embark on a sensory journey and opens a space in which past and present, spirituality and technology relate to each other in visible and invisible ways.

Credits:
Claude Jansen
Fabrice Mazliah
I-Fang Lin
Tuli Mekondjo
Norbert Pape
Johannes Hellberger

Information on content and sensori stimuli:
Use of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR). During the performance, audience members wear headsets twice for approximately 5 minutes. The use of VR headsets may cause discomfort.
Occasional references to German colonial history and allusions to the genocide committed in Namibia.

A production by Work of Act and COME IN TENT, supported by the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics within the framework of the program INHABIT // Artist-in-Residence, BKM Hamburg, and the Hamburgische Kulturstiftung. (Curator INHABIT Artist-in-Residence: Eike Walkenhorst, Curator Dancing Instruments: Claude Jansen)

The performances at Frankfurt LAB are made possible by the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics within the framework of the program INHABIT // Artist-in-Residence, in cooperation with Tanzfestival Rhein-Main 2025.