Portrait

Hardly anyone has developed the principle of participation to a greater degree than Felix Ruckert. For over ten years now, the choreographer has been giving his public a taste, a smell and a feeling for dance – in a metaphorical and literal sense. Repeatedly inspired by their curiosity and devotion, and the willingness to dispel fears, lower inhibitions and overcome moral reservations, he moves deeper and deeper into the folds of participation: in the intimate one-on-one meeting between dancers and audience members of “Hautnah”, the public intimacies in “Ring”, the careful bondage and whipping in “Secret Service” and the temporary role play in “United Kingdoms”. And even when the audience is allowed to remain an observer, as, for example, in the lecture performances “On Pain and Presence” and the installation “The Farm”, no one remains untouched. Discoveries of desire and pain, power, manipulation and resistance, devotion and subjugation are both an offer and a challenge.

In all these well-constructed and carefully controlled games with physical, spiritual, emotional and sexual boundaries, Felix Ruckert is always also concerned with the moment of experience and with reflecting that experience. The process is important and not the product; grasping (in both senses of the word), not observing. In order to completely dissolve the already pervious boundary between art and life, work and play, public and private, artist and audience, Felix Ruckert opened schwelle 7, his own ‘playground’ in Berlin-Wedding in 2007.