Editorial January–March 2023
Dear audience, dear artists,
We start the new year with our Winter School – a new project initiated by our theory curator Anna Leon. With the subtitle A little bit further down and to the side, this first edition will focus on the discourse surrounding dance and performance in South/Eastern European and Mediterranean regions.
We look forward to seeing many exciting artistic works in the weeks that follow – a mix of local and international projects. With 2020: Obscene, we will present the latest work by choreographer Alexandra Bachzetsis, which focuses on the relation between the staging of the excessive body and its consumption by the desiring gaze.
Lucy Wilke’s and Paweł Duduś’s intimate utopian contact pas de deux titled SCORES THAT SHAPED OUR FRIENDSHIP was invited to the 2021 Berliner Theatertreffen, has been on an internationally successful tour and can now finally be seen in Vienna. The presentation of Gisèle Vienne’s film Jerk is also long overdue. After more than twelve years of international touring, the artist made this film version of the eponymous stage production – which was also her last collaboration with British-Austrian musician Peter Rehberg, who died unexpectedly in 2021.
Ligia Lewis’s fan club, and we count ourselves among its members, should not miss A Plot / A Scandal in mid-February, which sees the choreographer weave together the history of racism, colonialism and enslavement with personal as well as mythological narratives. By contrast, Mette Ingvartsen and percussionist Will Guthrie give us a short but intense, ecstatic experience in All Around, a production on which we cooperated with the Musikverein Wien. With Natural Drama, Sorour Darabi presents a futuristic dance mythology. And, to add another highlight to this international selection, we simply must have Jefta van Dinther’s big group piece with Cullberg On Earth I’m Done: Islands.
Our local co-productions include a new dance piece for three performers (Mani Obeya, Yari Stilo and Elizabeth Ward) by Samuel Feldhandler, BONES and STONES by Claudia Bosse, which ploughs through layers of earth and time in terms of natural history, and a new trio by Michael Turinsky in which the performers create and celebrate a new form of community of smudgy, pulsating bodies in an organic-sensual way.
Finally, two more pieces of information: From mid-January, artist, performer and choreographer Krõõt Juurak – we love her dearly for her idiosyncratic artistic approach – will work with PARASOL, TQW’s own dance group. The results will be presented at Halle G in mid-April.
And we are happy to have visual artist Miriam Stoney as the model for our front page. She is currently also in charge of our Performance Passage at TQW Studios, curated by Andrea Maurer. A must-see!
Bettina Kogler (Artistic direction & Programme) & Christa Spatt (Programme)