The Nature of Us (2019) 

For "The Nature of Us" Jared Gradinger and Angela Schubot have invited both plant allies as well as five human performers as well as a sound and light gardener and finally the audience to a post-human group choreography “The Nature of Us.” The heterogeneous ensemble on the stage of HAU 2 creates a soilless garden with multiple voices to emerge from sounds and bodies. 
“The Nature of Us” invites its audience, human and otherwise, into this ecosystem – and searches for a consciousness that neither suppresses nor exaggerates nature, instead makes space for a co-creative polyphony. How can we come together to be the garden that we actually are? 
In the more than 10-year history of their collaboration, “The Nature of Us” is the first ensemble piece by the choreographer duo Schubot & Gradinger.

Concept & choreography: Angela Schubot and Jared Gradinger in collaboration with Nature
With and by: Comfrey, Andreea David, Fern, Geranium, Golden Rod, Jared Gradinger, Chestnut, Clover, Lav-ender, Roberto Martínez, Moss, Andrius Mulokas, Liz Rosenfeld, Datura, Anouk Thériault, White Sage, Rosehip, Birch and other
Lightgarden: Annegret Schalke
Soundgarden: Stefan Rusconi
Costume: Claudia Hill
Costume assistant: Diane Esnault, Emilia Patrignani
Space assistant: Jonas Droste
Artistic collaboration: Sigal Zouk
Coaching: Shannon Cooney
Assistant: Sofia Fantuzzi
Photo: Rachel de Joode
Press and production: björn & björn

Produced by: Angela Schubot and Jared Gradinger. Co-production HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Ponderosa and Nature. Supported by Hauptstadtkulturfonds

Premiere HAU2 Hebbel am Ufer February 28th-March 3rd 2019

Weasels, trolls, anteaters, mumins? In addition, chirps, marbles, whispering - like melodic echolalia of an unknown language without speaking, without the compulsion of grammar, more like something pearly, something that grows in a vegetative pulse but never becomes a pure rhythm, more like the modulation movements of a humming ecosystem. Later, the chimella shells turn into music that sounds like the child touching time*, like repetitive snippets of lullabies of another species or perhaps more of a new entity that removes the compulsion of taxonomies - not like a snake, the skin, but like two bodies that lay down their bodily boundaries, like the attempt to do so, commented by this symphonic jazz number: Does anyone laugh at the pathos of desire to become one? So much desire at all between persuasion, bewitchment, violence and mountains of loudspeakers - a festival of survival that has nothing reassuring about it, a solidarity in the unknown that turns into intoxication, and right in the middle: oases of quiet intensities. (Four point Five: Writing on Dance)