Winner of the Sophiensaele Jury Price  @100Grad Berlin Festival, March 2010

Hold Me Until You Break is an award-winning, durational performance installation. The core of it is two people holding each other until they break, representing the journey of a love relationship. The work plays with juxtaposition and time, placing immediate physical and emotional reactions caused by the performers’ exhaustion at the forefront. The piece works with live improvised music that interacts with the physical performance.

“…the performers manage to tackle the subject of responsibility for the other in a moving and multi-layered way and by means of very simple tools. They carry and hold on to each other till complete exhaustion, till reaching their pain threshold, till their bodies collapse due to the burden of the other. A nearly wordless performance about implicit togetherness, and of immense tenderness.” Frauke Pahlke, Jury, 100°Berlin festival

Hold Me Until You Break was originally conceived in 2009 following a year-long research project into improvisation. The work was initially created and premiered at Jacksons Lane in London, before touring it to Iceland and Switzerland, where it was performed as a free improvisation. Bottlefed then led a second research-phase at BAC, where they developed the piece into a performance installation, stripping the work to its core idea of two people holding until they break. They premiered the final piece at the 100°Berlin Festival, where they won the Jury Prize for best performance at Sophiensaele.

The most recent performance of Hold Me Until You Break took place in September 2011 in a very special London location: at the Brunel Museum Tunnel (underground) and with Björk-collaborator/Hang player Manu Delago (www.manudelago.com).

The next performance of Hold Me Until You Break will take place in Switzerland at Festival Heimspiel 2012, Dampfzentrale Bern. Performances in collaboration with Philipp Moll (www.philippmoll.com).
Saturday 25 February 2012, 19.30 & Sunday 26 February 2012, 18.30

Past Performances

•                Noche Scratxe Gaua #5, November 2010, Sala Amarika Areto, Vitoria – Spain

•                Best of 100°Berlin,  September 2010, Sophiensaele, Berlin – Germany

•                100° Berlin Festival, 07 March 2010, Sophiensaele – Gallerie Jarmuschek, Berlin

•                Vulpes Vulpes Arts Gallery, 25 February 2010 6pm-9pm, London

•                Schlachthaus Theater Bern, September 2009, Bern, Switzerland

•                Artfart Performance Arts Festival, August 2009, IDNO, Reykjavik, Iceland

•                Maddid’s Nordic Festival, July 09, The Space, London

•                Symposium, April 09, Rose Bruford College, Sidcup, Kent

•                Jacksons Lane, April 09, London

Hold Me Until You Beak is available for touring

The piece lends exceptionally well to touring as the setup is very simple and the piece fully adaptable to any indoor space. Due to the nature and content of the work, it suits unconventional performance spaces, and with our lighting installation we create a world of light and shades that form the necessary intimacy between the performers and the audience members, who are free to move or be stationary throughout the piece.

Whenever possible and depending on where we are performing ‘Hold Me’, we always endeavor to source local experimental musicians interested in being involved in the performance, in order to widen our network of collaborators and nurture artistic exchange. This means that we experiment with a wide selection of instruments and new musical styles.

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