We had the good fortune of connecting with Isabel von Rittberg and we’ve shared our conversation below…
This summer, Boulder Arts Outdoors offered three evenings of socially-distant diverse performances featuring everything from bluegrass musicians to a modern-day juggler. On Friday, Saturday and Sunday, the drive-in event will celebrate its second installment by welcoming returning and new artists to the Gerald Stazio Softball Fields parking lot, 2445 Stazio Drive, Boulder.
No ropes, no silks, and no wires existed, yet the dancers of AscenDance Project were suspended in the air. The world premiere of New Heights: Dancing on the Walls that Divide Us appeared at the Dairy Arts Center on October 12 & 13, 2019. With this new work, AscenDance Project strives to call attention to the numerous ways division can transpire, then counters it with connection.
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German dancer and rock climber Isabel von Rittberg was only 9 years old when the Berlin Wall came down in her country in 1989. Now, as founder and performer of Boulder-based AscenDance Project, she uses climbing walls as vertical canvases to express a myriad of emotions through thoughtful and stirring movements. The latest offering from this innovative troupe, “New Heights: Dancing on the Walls that Divide Us,” will take audiences on a multi-sensory journey that explores the current political climate, the intricacies of the human condition and the unrelenting power of love.
Today we’d like to introduce you to Isabel von Rittberg. Isabel, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
I grew up in Beyenburg, a tiny village tucked away in Germany’s green rolling hills riding bareback and roaming around the woods. Summers were spent hiking Montana’s Rocky Mountains while visiting my mother’s family.
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Boulder-local Isabel von Rittberg is both a dancer and a rock climber, and she remembers the precise moment, during a drive to Montana to visit her Grandmother, that she first thought of combining the two disciplines. “I was driving through the Virgin River Gorge in Utah, listening to music and looking at the towering rock walls, and I had a vision so clear and so strong that there was no way I could have ignored it,” she says. “I told my Grandma, ‘I’m going to build a climbing wall and dance on it.’” Read More...
Ascendance Project was thrilled to perform at TEDxBoulder this year! Working from the event’s theme of “Climate & Change,” this piece is choreographed to highlight our country’s modern divisions, and demonstrate how love is the key to understanding and union. Don’t build walls. Dance on them.
Link to Video
By Natalie Berry
A video has been doing the rounds on social media recently - receiving over 26,000 views so far - featuring a troupe of dancers using a climbing wall as an apparatus upon which to choreograph a dance routine. Isabel Rittberg is the founder, artistic director and a dancer within the group AscenDance - based in Boulder, Colorado in the United States.
Combining climbing moves, dance elements and music, Isabel has created a new art form which focusses on the more graceful and gymnastic aspects of climbing - there's no grunting or powerscreaming here!
I asked Isabel a few questions about her project... Read More...