STAGES INTO THE NOW is both a series of films and a solo for Scott Jennings.

As a series of films, a triptych, different disciplines and generations meet to attend to three wounded locations, the Wuppertal Opera house, Germany, the ancient city of Messini, Greece and Nicosia, Cyprus to transform them into places of cure and worlds revived.

STAGES INTO THE NOW is a choreographic film by Alexandra Waierstall, created in collaboration with Scott Jennings, former dancer of Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal, and featuring her father, artist Horst Weierstall. The work explores how dance carries time across generations, architecture, and image.

Set within the abandoned opera house of Wuppertal, the building is approached as a breathing organism. Marked by pandemic silence and flood devastation, it becomes a resonant chamber for questions of memory and impermanence — a living archive where personal experience and cultural history intersect. This physical and temporal setting informs the film’s approach: cinema itself becomes a temporal body, a site where gesture, architecture, artistic lineage, and image co-exist.

Through the presence of Scott Jennings and Horst Weierstall, time is not represented but embodied — as inheritance, artistic transmission, and fragile continuity. The film treats the moving image as a primary choreographic space, where intimate movement, spoken word, music, and voice enter into dialogue, dissolving distinctions between private memory and collective history. An original score by Volker Bertelmann (Hauschka) unfolds as a durational structure — at once intimate and expansive.

STAGES INTO THE NOW reflects on transmission — between father and daughter, across artistic lineages, and between embodied presence and its digital afterlife — while understanding the film itself as a space where dance persists. Rather than narrating time, the work suspends it, proposing a layered temporality in which past and present remain simultaneously active, asking how we inhabit the permanence of change.

Watch teaser.

With: Scott Jennings, Horst Weierstall; Film by: Alexandra Waierstall; Director of photography: Cédric Hopf, Sören Parker; Music: Volker Bertelmann © Needle Wood Publishing Edition/Bosworth Music; Editing: Cédric Hopf, Sören Parker; Text: Maria Iole Karolidou, Alexandra Waierstall, Horst Weierstall; Costumes: Alexandra Waierstall, Horst Weierstall; Choreographic assistance: Ying Yun Chen; Colorist: Cédric Hopf, Sören Parker; Technical support: Fredy Deisenroth; Management: Judith Jaeger

Production: Noema Dance Works e.V.; Supported by: the NATIONAL PERFORMANCE NETWORK – STEPPING OUT, funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media within the framework of the initiative NEUSTART KULTUR. Assistance Program for Dance, Kunststiftung NRW, Ministerium für Kultur und Wissenschaft des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen, Kulturamt der Landeshauptstadt Düsseldorf. And the kind support of: Opernhaus Wuppertal, tanzhaus nrw, Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch and Pina Bausch Zentrum, Kulturbüro Wuppertal.

With: Ying Yun Chen, Amy Josh, Ioanna Paraskevopoulou, Evangelia Randou, Eftychia Stefanou, Karolina Szymura; Film by: Alexandra Waierstall; Director of photography: Cédric Hopf, Sören Parker; Editing: Cédric Hopf, Sören Parker; Costumes: Alexandra Waierstall, Horst Weierstall; Management: Judith Jaeger

Production: Noema Dance Works e.V.; Supported by: Ministerium für Kultur und Wissenschaft des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen.