Ula Sickle

Sickle often collaborates with artists from other domains such as visual arts (e.g., Alexis Destoop and Daniela Bershan), contemporary music (e.g., Yann Leguay, Peter Lenaerts and Stine Janvin Motland) or architecture (e.g., Laurent Liefooghe).

It consists of seven new works of seven minutes created by seven artists and performed by seven dancers of the Ballet National Marseille and ICK.

[3] In her productions Sickle is looking for ways to open the canon of contemporary dance, which is strongly influenced by evolutions in Europe and North America.

A point of departure is her interest in contemporary popular music and dance, such as found in, among others, the nightclubs of the Congolese capital Kinshasa.

In the productions, she follows the individual history of the dancers and the way in which their movements are culturally and politically colored.

Her interest in globalized pop culture, not only as music but also as a web of references, trends, attitudes and gestures, was also the basis of Extended Play (2016), in which she collaborated again with Daniela Bershan (aka DJ Baba Electronics).

In Prelude (Sickle, Stine Janvin Motland and Yann Leguay, 2014), subtle live sound modeling often makes it unclear whether Stine Janvin Motland, known for her original extensive vocal techniques, sings or that her faint sounds are manipulated digitally.

The flashes of darkness and light follow each other at an extreme pace, so the viewer can never see the dancer in her totality, but only in fragments that already disappear when they appear.