Tanzquartier Wien

In the foyer, I see the dancers taking their positions, two men, one woman, a camera rolling. Christine Gaigg performs, one hand on her private parts, the other in the trousers of one of the dancers. Some visitors look on, some are on their way to the cloakroom, some talk in undertones. Proximity and distance, curiosity, some furtive glances, some direct looks, a dance that has already begun, or rather, that has always been taking place. Watching and showing oneself in their dialectic, a seeing that is seen, an observation being observed.

This is soon followed by admittance. The benches for the audience are arranged in a triangle, the middle of the bare room is a section with three angles for Affair, the third part of Gaigg’s trilogy on sexuality. The dancers are in the audience, amid the people, are among us, they are us. The text was written by the artist in the 1990s, an “objet trouvé” that speaks of desiring the other in many voices and in a dense language.

Eroticism becomes apparent in the power that drives Gaigg’s characters. They show themselves as yearning, seeking, doubting, as tearing themselves to pieces, driven by a sense of lack that initiates a sequence of searching and fulfillment. In Plato’s “Symposium”[1], Eros appears as the son of Penia, of poverty, of the ever-needy, and Poros, the pathfinder, who cunningly discovers possibilities to pave the way for desire. Eros is the experience of this lack combined with the power to remove obstacles so as to quash it. By means of text and body, Gaigg’s characters tell of the unrestrainedness of longing and having experienced a kind of power themselves. Conversations, monologues, messages present ever new paths to the body of the ever new other. A multi-layered sexuality comes to light in the sequence of excitement, hope, disappointment and ecstasy, finding its way in encounters with many others.

A driving factor behind affairs has always been the appeal of transgressing normative boundaries, at which desire is kindled and paths must first be discovered. But the transgressing of boundaries is no longer characterised by a struggle for the third person and the ensuing, often catastrophic consequences, as they still feature in the novels of Émile Zola or Henrik Ibsen[2], in which – especially female – infidelity can only be achieved at considerable cost. The transgressing of boundaries today presents itself as a search for each new other, like a sequence, infinitely continuable, as the act of collecting beginnings, kisses and bodies. “To want everything and hold on to everything”, I hear. The performers move through the audience like force fields, whispers between the rows, touches, a shirt is unbuttoned, feet are massaged. Then the light changes, and I hear the seekers’ voices in their almost incessant movement. From today’s perspective, settling for the one excludes not only the other but all others, everybody – opening the room, the auditorium, on the other hand, is inclusive, points to boundlessness. All manifest themselves as possibilities, desire is afforded space to spark any time the next person steps out from the crowd. “People fall prey to their unlimited possibilities. […] It isn’t constraints, rules and habits that keep people from acting on possibilities anymore but other possibilities”, according to Sven Hillenkamp.[3] The seemingly paradoxical notion that infinite possibilities turn those who desire into restless prey of their own desires is also a theme in Christine Gaigg’s Affair. At some point, the sentence “None of this works” is uttered, leaving me pensive.

[1] Platon, Symposium, ed. by Barbara Zahnpfennig, Hamburg 2012.
[2] E.g. Ibsen’s Ghosts, Zola’s A Love Episode, Thérèse Raquin, Nana.
[3] Sven Hillenkamp, Das Ende der Liebe. Gefühle im Zeitalter unendlicher Freiheit, Munich 2012, p. 49f.

Katharina Lacina is a philosopher. She teaches at the University of Vienna and holds the position of academic coordinator of the “Philosophical Practice” and “Ethics” postgraduate courses. She heads the Philosophy module of the Studium Generale at the University of Vienna’s Postgraduate Center.

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