Clemens Habicht: What do Sydney Dance Company have in common with ‘Flume’?

“Early last year, Sydney Dance Company Artistic Director Rafael Bonachela chanced upon the video clip for Some Minds by the renowned Australian music producer Flume. Shot at the Sydney Opera House, it features a dancer whose body distorts, warps and ripples as he performs on the Concert Hall stage. “I thought it was just beautiful and the movement really captured my attention,” Bonachela says. Discovering that the director was Australian, Bonachela made a mental note of his name: Clemens Habicht.

Not long afterwards, Sydney Dance Company worked with David Jones on the launch of its 2016 Autumn/Winter collection for which the dancers appeared in photographs, a live fashion show and a film. Coincidentally, DJs had commissioned Habicht to direct the film. “It was a great project actually and we really enjoyed working with each other,” says Habicht.

“Right after we finished, I said to Clemens: ‘I’m doing a new project next year. I know what the music is and it feels, listening to it, that a film might work. Would you be interested?’ ” – Excerpt from an interview with the Sunday Telegraph on 2 October, 2016.

So began a creative collaboration between Artistic Director Rafael Bonachela and Visual Designer Clemens Habicht, for the world premiere of Anima.

Using 3D scanners to film the dancers, Clemens’ visual projection for Untamed is a reactive accompaniment that translates the expressive forms and gestures of the dancers into abstractions of motion, a visual insight that floods the stage in radiant chords of colour that renders an inner emotional world large, exposed and brilliant, it fills the air around the dancers like music.

“It’s a simple expression of movement. It’s not about being clever with technology. It’s about moving someone emotionally.” – Clemens Habicht

About Clemens Habicht
Clemens Habicht is an Australian director, designer and illustrator who lives and works in Paris, France. He has directed videos for Flume, Tame Impala, Bloc Party and The Presets and has collaborated on performances exhibited at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, ‘Performa’, New York and the Serralves Museum, Porto. His design work includes commissions for the Biennale of Sydney, The Secession Museum, Vienna, The City of Sydney, and the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, as well as illustrations for the Sydney Theatre Company, Artbank and the Bulletin Magazine. He has lectured at the University of Technology Sydney and the Bauhaus Weimar, and is a director of Galerie Allen, Paris. Read his full bio here.

Have a look at some of Clemens’ past work:
“Some Minds” by Flume
by Flume
“Truth” by Bloc Party by Bloc Party
“Expectation” by Tame Impala by Tame Impala

Anima is part of our upcoming season Untamed, only in Sydney 18 – 29 Oct.