A Symbiosis of Dance and Music: Listen! by Ceren Oran

Schwere Reiter, Munich
November 21, 2025

For the Munich-based choreographer Ceran Oran, of Turkish origin, music is a companion that has followed her through all phases and emotions of her life. As she discovered the Austrian duo BartolomeyBittmann, known for their progressive string compositions, she says, she found music that offers something for every occasion from weddings to funerals to everything in between.

Oran calls her latest piece, Listen!, a dance concert because not only was it inspired by BartolomeyBittmann’s music, but the two musicians play live on stage and are part of the action.

For it, she asked the six members of her company, Moving Borders, to choose a favorite piece from one of the duo’s four albums and then create a dance. The result is eight short pieces by seven choreographers, divided by an instrumental break. Each piece bears the title of the music. They are performed continuously without intermission, creating a loosely connected string of indicated stories full of strong emotions, that stir your curiosity and make you want to know more.

It opens with Matthias Bartolomey sitting with his cello on a smoke-filled stage. He remains stationary throughout, whereas Klemens Bittmann, who plays violin and mandola, at times walks across the stage, at times joining the dancers. That smoke made your eyes itch in the intimate 114- seat Schwere-Reiter, where the stage is level with first row and the dancers are sometimes so close that you could reach out and touch them.

In this mysterious atmosphere, the dancers move around swiping music bows, creating sounds like whiplashes, perhaps indicating that it was the music that pushed the choreography.

After a while, they disappear leaving Jaro Ondruš, creator and performer of ‘Krystallos’. standing alone centre-stage. Only moving his hands and arms he makes animal-like gestures, his limbs engaged in a heated dialogue.

He is followed by ‘Neptun’ by Oran for five dancers who move from foot to foot in unison, disperse and thrust their arms as if hitting someone, only to then reverse the movement making it look as if they are stabbing themselves. The music meanwhile goes from the sound of wild strings to more folk-like harmonies. When the group gathers, they look like one organism, bending and spreading. At one point the musicians stop dead, and in the following quietness, all you hear is the dancers breathing heavily, their movement slowing until they come to a halt. Bartolomey sits quietly, light turned on his face making him look like a demon, perhaps the one forcing the dancers through what looked like a secret ritual.

Created and performed by Jadwiga Mordarska, ‘Wo der Hund’ (Where the Dog is) basically consists of her walking backwards at different paces, eventually turning into small circles while gesturing as if talking to somebody. Sophia Casprini’s ‘Haim’ is for three women, two of whom manipulate the third as if taking her through a secret initiation. The music soars into other realms, Bittmann sings, but with tones spreading like fog around the dancers.

A musical interlude, ‘Traunklang’, interrupts the dancing and Bartolomey and Bittmann create a sound-universe full of dreams with their unusual sounds. At times it brings associations to jazz, at times it is melodic and very beautiful, at times they hit the strings with the bows making tunes that soar and sound like an orchestra or quieten down to a whisper. It was riveting and very emotional.

The uplifting feeling ended, however, with ‘Dynamo’ by Oran. Two men sit on chairs facing each other. They communicate with their hands, arms and torsos only. But what starts as an amicable dialogue soon turns into what looks like a heated argument. Seamlessly following that is ‘Lucca est’, performed and choreographed by Jihun Choi. He simply rises and starts walking backwards in a square of light. Perhaps away from the quarrel, perhaps back to where it started.

A woman joins Choi, who eventually leaves, and the sections turns into ‘Les Tecchler’, again by Oran, a duet she dances with Karolina Hejnová. That, in turn, develops into ‘Insieme’ by Jovana Zelenovič. As the rest of the dancers appear, some dance, some sit on table-like platforms of various sizes and heights. It builds to a great crescendo, Listen! ending as they convene mid-stage, sitting on their knees, forming a line from Bartolomy with his cello at one end to Bittmann playing his violin at the other. They hold hands; at last all connected.

And this is perhaps what Listen! is all about. The music seemed to be bound together by moving bodies, which again were bound together through the music. It made you see the dance as music and hear the music as dance.