Friday, 23.05.

18:30 – In the Shadow of Forward Motion (Performance)

As an invocation to our ability to shift identities into, out of, beyond and within, we dance in known ways and weird ways. We burrow in, getting under the skin of transformation, digging for the ways trauma and joy shift identity. What happens when you are intimate with the stranger of your own body? What emerges when we embrace the enigmatic? In this work, the self is not static — it is a shifting cast of characters, moving through a dynamic landscape, searching for, but never finding a resting place. Indeed, what seems clear turns out to be a mirage. Pronouncements and language become awkward, the body turns inside out.

part of ProtoZone19: Ruptures \ Reliances, 23.05.2025-03.08.2025

Created in collaboration with:

Dan Immanuel Roth – Performance

Dan Immanuel Roth & Layton Lachman – Costume & Scenography

Samuel Hertz – Sound

Arta de Mi – Light

emeka ene – Text

Ethan Folk & Caitlin Berrigan – Video

Nattan Dobkin – Dramaturgy

Nagi Gianni – Mask

Jack Randol – Textile

Commissioned in cooperation by Haus der Kunst München, Goethe Institute London

Supported by ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen

Layton Lachman is an artist living in Berlin. Layton creates performances rooted in somatics, channeling experiential physical practices into immersive, sensory complex worlds. Their practice is often a contemplation on the interplay between individuality and the materiality of our interconnectedness. Utilizing an ever diversifying range of artistic mediums and contexts, Layton’s collaged choreographies include film, text, voice & sound, objects and intense physicalities, that once combined in a work are often distinguished by their surrealist, psychedelic, dreamlike qualities.

Layton’s practice is deeply collaborative, with long and cherished artistic relationships that have evolved over time. This work is deeply influenced by the ideas proposed in Gender without Identity by psychoanalysts Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini, as well as numerous other queer,postcolonial and Black feminist theorists. As a maker of live art, Layton is often referencing notions of . sci-fi world building, as well as practices of bodily and spiritual catharsis through dance and ritual. Their work has been exhibited and performed primarily in Europe and the USA. Most recently they premiered In the Shadow of Forward Motion, commissioned by the London Goethe Institute, at Haus der Kunst in Munich. In addition to their performative practice, Layton is an independent curator, as well as teaching in Berlin and as a guest lecturer at several universities in the USA. Before moving to Berlin, Layton worked and lived in the San Francisco Bay Area of California.

Samuel Hertz (b. Washington, DC, USA) is a composer and researcher working with sound-sensing networks of environmental science research, whose works span electronic music, interstellar radio transmissions, deep sea broadcasts, and doom metal concerts. In addition to his solo work, he is a frequent collaborator and sound designer for choreographic and theatrical projects, often designing experimental, immersive atmospheres. His work has been exhibited and performed in the Ars Electronica Festival (AT), Palais de Tokyo (FR), MUDAM Luxembourg (LU), Akademie der Künste (DE), Haus der Kunst (DE), Pioneer Works/Wave Farm (US), the Onassis Foundation (GR), Fylkingen (SE), Biennale for Sound and Listening (DK), National Science + Media Museum (UK), and the International Space Station, among others. In collaborative performance contexts, his work has been presented in venues such as Tanzplattform Deutschland 2020/2022, ImPulsTanz, Sophiensaele, BONE Festival for Performance Art, Videonale.19, and the Macerata Opera Festival, among many others. Hertz is a graduate of Mills College Center for Contemporary Music, where he studied electronic music and composition with Pauline Oliveros, Maggi Payne, Zeena Parkins, and Roscoe Mitchell. He is currently an AHRC/Techne-funded PhD candidate at the Royal Holloway University of London Centre for GeoHumanities, researching sound-sensing networks within bioacoustic conservation and politics of acoustic sensing.