Angelus Novus IX
Angelus Novus IX is a video dance project in conversation with Walter Benjamin’s reflections on human history and the “angel of history” he divined in a work by visual artist Paul Klee. The work was filmed on November 5th, 2020, just days after the US Presidential election, while the outcome remained uncertain.
“His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back his turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. The storm is what we call progress.”
-Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History
Choreography, performance, & costume: Anneke Hansen
Videography: Andreas Wimmer