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PUBLIC SPACES, PRIVATE

In the context of his project 2-3 Straßen Jochen Gerz recently called for a "society of authors". The responsibility and the creativity of each and every individual for the urban and social space to which the fine artist is appealing here can also be formulated choreographically and pushes the gaze, pushes the body to the edges of the mediatised and into the shimmering peripheries of the easily arguable and well known.

This call is rather aimed at a change of perspective, the step to one side, to hardly visible movements, in order to be able to speak clearly again. This figure of the position shift and the ability of the choreographic to penetrate and permeate its own and other spaces is also taken up by the artistic positions at the Tanzquartier Wien in May and June: as directed gestures of inscription that are simultaneously obliged to the diversion of the choir, as markings of the triad of art, audience and civil society. They make the performativeness of the dance itself their own and describe a critical and subversive play with coding and re-coding, with everyday objects, routines and rules, move in the imbalance of social and political necessities and needs, structures of organisation and self-organisation, mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, individual and communal, voluntary and involuntary agreements, instructions and manipulations.

Choreography here does not mean a practice concerning the fixing of movement or the construction of forms and frameworks to be imitated. Rather, changing classifications, new and reorienting, temporary communities and role changes come to the awareness of the spaces that we enter physically and conceptually: what makes a place private, familiar or public? Who defines it and how can we change it?

The bodies in urban space do not speak simply of and about the relationship of the individual with the community, but are themselves actors of it – agents of a cartography that is interested in new readings of the familiar and that opens up spatial remembrance and forgetting, the suppression and occupation as components and above all the possibility of intervention and change in the construction and reception of one’s own real as well as fictive spaces.

(Author: Sandra Noeth/Head of Dramaturgy TQW; Text printed in TQW Program May/June 10)

ARCHIVE:
Touché: At the Threshold of Touching - TQW Program April 10
A Stop in the Space of Possibility - TQW Program March 10
Where is We - TQW Program Jan./Feb. 10
Skin of Movement - TQW Program Dec. 09
Bodies in Distance and Infection - TQW Program Nov. 09
Reading Tracks - TQW Program Sept./Oct. 09