Opening Richard Siegal
Ballet of Difference: art.Life

Multimedia installation

When:
Wed, May 28, 2025, 7pm–11pm

Free admission

What else:

There will be simultaneous translation into German Sign Language.
No registration is required.

When:
Wed, May 28, 2025, 7pm–11pm

Free admission

What else:

There will be simultaneous translation into German Sign Language.
No registration is required.

On Wednesday, May 28 from 7pm, the opening of the Multimedia installation "Richard Siegal. art.Life" will take place. Lenbachhaus Munich cordially invites you and your friends! 

The video "Japanese Precision Walking", also known under the title "Shudan Kodo", went viral in 2012, captivating a global audience with stunning visual effects. It shows a group of fifty athletes striding through a gymnasium in perfect synchrony, moving through a series of continually shifting geometric formations: they divide into teams that fuse again, part ways only to return toward one another at high velocity, their paths intersecting and joining. These images, which touch on a complex of societal questions about interaction and about the individual and the collective, fired up the choreographer Richard Siegal’s imagination. In 2022, Siegal and his company Ballet of Difference paid a three-week research visit to the Nippon Sports University in Yokohama, Japan, where they learned the rigorous principles and code of conduct of precision walking from the athletes of "Shudan Kodo". Their experiences inspired the piece "Ballet of (Dis)Obedience", created in 2023. Siegal returned to Japan in 2024 to work with fifty-three athletes and two dancers to develop the performance "Collective Action", in which he focuses on the inner logic of "Shudan Kodo". Its bears resemblance to the operation of digital media—basic formulas are varied to produce an ever-changing combinatorics. The music was contributed by alva noto; the lighting design, by Matthias Singer. Video documentation of "Collective Action" is the chief component of the multichannel video installation "art.Life", which will premiere at the Lenbachhaus in May 2025.

A production of Muffatwerk, Munich, in cooperation with the Yokohama International Performing Arts Meeting, the Goethe Institute in Tokyo, and Synaesthetica. Event held as part of DANCE Festival, Munich

With speeches from
Florian Roth, Member of the Munich City Council representing the Lord Mayor
Matthias Mühling, Director of Lenbachhaus 
Eva Huttenlauch, Project management

In the context of the exhibition