last footprint: kind of 30 august 2025
: a vinyl
a project that spanned 2019-2024
PHOTOS BY BERNIE NG
songs for friends: a vinyl is an album we have made for you. This is a record of loss, and also of growing up – which is almost the same thing. As the record plays from outside-in, the rings of a tree are growing from inside-out. Time spirals, and we skip rope across it.
In this living room, analogue and digital bodies become entangled; memories dismantle, marred by glitches. Here, violence and intimacies yield to each other with tenderness. Pull, push, pull. In the speculative realities that emerge, we navigate dissociation and change.
This is the place where we created ourselves. Come on in. All is as constructed as it is real.
This performance developed out of the physicality of rope-skipping, a long afternoon of reminiscence, and a co-reading of Hermann Hesse’s Kinderseele and Demian (two novels that delve into a child’s experiences of guilt and shame, of light and shadow.) Domenik and Ashley grew up on opposite ends of the world. In this transmedial performance, they have built a shared world out of fractured memories that are charged with violence and intimacy. Each element – choreography, text, scenography, and sound – has been crafted by them, by hand. By placing separate memories into the same space, they activate speculative realities in which they navigate hurt, dissociation, and change, no longer alone but together. The performance offers a personal, visceral, and sometimes puzzling experience that invites spectators to connect through their own memories.
Concept, choreography, scenography, text, sound, performance: ashleyho+domeniknaue
| Costume: Nina Perino | Opening dramaturgical guidance: Merel Heering | Closing dramaturgical guidance: Ingrid Berger Myhre | Lighting design and technical support: Edwin van Steenbergen, Quintus Visser | Special thanks to: Jill Kupers, Jaz Chen Jiaxin, Kristin de Groot | Production: Dansateliers
PHOTOS BY AMANDA HARPUT
DESIGN BY HO YUHAN ASHLEY
AMSTERDAM, 26 MAY 2024, THEATER BELLEVUE
This show is still available for booking. Contact us if you are interested in giving this work another stage. If it is now 2029, it is the perfect time to think about childhood. If it is 2040, it is the perfect time. If it is 2053 and you and we are still here, it is the perfect time.
songs for friends was our first project together, dating back to 2019. this is where we started, and in a way, where we will always turn back to. here is the project that haunted us for years, till 2024, when it finally had its premiere. in this work we were obsessed with circular time. we've moved on now into new projects, new temporalities of creating, but this work comes back and back, and perhaps one day we'll arrive at its shores again, laughing at its ludicrousness, revel in its secrets
We miss home and we cannot really remember it. In this collaboration, we work with the re-contextualisation of memories as a tool to build speculative realities. Our memories conflate and shape new spaces, in which we invent ourselves, project this invention, and construct the ways our friends know us and what they will remember us by.
We care about how we share with the people we care about. We realise that our methods of sharing, in our practices and daily communication, are often processed through layers of translation. We can make work for ourselves and let everyone else experience what they experience, but how can we attempt a kind of generosity that extends to our grandparents too? Maybe they would like to know us better.
In processing memories together, what remained crucial was the element of play, which we found in the skipping rope as an object, and rope-skipping as a mode of gameplay. We have become increasingly intrigued by the physicality of rope-skipping and the potential of the ropes as performers alongside us.
Although the research process of «songs for friends» started in end-2019, our time with it has been constantly interrupted by the Covid-19 situation. We are currently working with how gaps between working phases shape the process. What parts are we taking with us – which are we leaving behind – how will new ideas find their place within this ongoing process? The work has never been realised, and we need the space, resources, and feedback to develop it into something more material.
Together, we want to build a shapeshifting space, aloud – the living room is the forest is a closet is tomorrow. This is how we remember; this is how you know us; this is how we can leave the room.
click on the left arrow
to approach side B
click on the right arrow to approach side A
after a long time,,,,,,,