Commissions
This is it (2011)
Created for Candoco Dance Company's Vicky Malin, Matthias Sperling's This is it forms part of the company's Turning 20 annviersary programme and is the first solo commission in the company's 20-year history. The work toys playfully with our expectations of a solo contemporary dance performer and features Vicky’s live performance of her specially-written, iTunes-released, uplifting euro-pop single This is it.
Click here to for more details and tour dates
Click here to view a video about the making of This is it
Click here to read Southbank Centre's interview with Sperling and Malin about This is it
Click here to download the song on iTunes
Only Human (2010)
Commissioned by Northern School of Contemporary Dance (Leeds, UK) for third year degree students, this group work asks 'what is technique?'. Eleven performers take to the stage as superheroes, dressed head to toe in blazing lycra, complete with capes and pants over tights. In a concentrated and exposing silence, each performer engages in a highly individual performance practice, experimentally testing out what wonders they can achieve through the combination of their attentive presence as people and their articulate skill as dancers.
Duet, Duet (2010)
Commissioned by Southbank Centre (London, UK) with support from Laban Theatre and Yorkshire Dance, this work is a choreographic response to celebrated composer George Benjamin's Viola, Viola - a fiery and exhilarating piece for two solo violas. Created to mark the composer's fiftieth birthday celebrations at Southbank's Queen Elizabeth Hall, this double duet is danced by Matthias Sperling and Rachel Krische alongside violists Paul Silverthorne and Eniko Magyar. The work reflects on how our individual, momentary perception of the music is already an embodiment of it, a physical event in the brain. Endeavouring to make this perception visible, the choreographic score is a densely structured series of tasks that map out a journey allowing the performers to involve their present experience as a material. Like the violists, the dancers are engrossed in closely braided relationships, negotiating a tension between shared and individual consciousness.
Click here to read Londondance.com's interview with Sperling about Duet, Duet
Falling down and getting back up again (2009)
Commissioned by Mapdance, University of Chichester's M.A. performance company, this work for seven dancers forms part of a touring programme of short works by several different choreographers. It is conceived as a 'rest' in the programme, featuring the unaccompanied performance of simple movement undergoing a slow and odd evolution. The work reflects on how engaging and complex even the simplest performance situation can be, asking: What sort of creature is a performer? And what sort of habitat is performance? What frontiers are there for us to discover, simply through the performance and observation of one another's movement? And perhaps most significantly: If a contemporary dancer falls in the forest, does anybody see?
1998 (2008)
Commissioned by Laban (London, UK) for third year degree students, 1998 is a group work accompanied by a text written by the choreographer and spoken live by the performers. The work was sparked by the discovery that the Laban archive carefully stored the costumes worn by the choreographer when he was himself a student at the college, in Laban's Transitions Dance Company, ten years earlier. Unearthing and re-animating these costumes, the work is an exploration of the way that dance operates through a dialogue of memory between audience members, performers and choreographers. The work provokes thoughts about how dance works endure through memory alone, and how our past experiences as dance artists and people always stay with us, written in the body.
Listen (2008)
Commissioned by The Place (London, UK) for SHIFT Youth Dance Company, Listen is an interactive movement and sound installation for two performers and one audience member.
Shuffle (2007)
Commissioned by Dance City (Newcastle, UK) for Northern Youth Dance Company, Shuffle is a work for seven dancers and the contents of their MP3 players. Each dancer features in a section set to a song of their own choice. In each performance, these songs are randomly shuffled, creating a playful live mix of their personalities as dancers and young people.
Rubrix (2007)
Commissioned by English National Ballet School, Rubrix is a solo for Prix de Lausanne winner Charles Yoshiyama, winning him the contemporary prize for his performance at the Youth America Grand Prix, Lincoln Centre, New York.