Concerned with "looking beyond beauty", Düsseldorf choreographer Ben J. Riepe and his company produced a five-part series of dance performances. The images took shapes within a year in short, intensive rehearsal processes at varying locales. After the deadly conspiracy in the checkerboard room (Image 1), the encounter with the devil in the black room (Image 2) and the third image about love, sex and vanity, the fourth image "The white room" is an allegorical tale of the void to be filled. Labyrinthine image 5, as the conclusion to the series, compiles the separate stations into a performative installation.
Ben J. Riepe constructs whimsical worlds. The compositions of his scenes are beautiful - comical - surreal. He is wokring along the border to the visual arts and draws upon means of painting, photography and film. His actors move with a reduced, formal language of movement in engrossed artificial worlds, turning to the absurd when confronted with mundane concerns and their various states of emergency. Tension mounts, at all points ready to break out - into comical or a dramatic directions.

Ben J. Riepe graduated from the Folkwang Hochschule in Essen in dance and choreography and was subsequently hired by Pina Bausch and VA Wölfl. Since 2004, he has been working as a freelance choreographer in Düsseldorf.