Tanzquartier Wien

In Cloth Ball Square, Oleg Soulimenko delves deeper into his fascination with materiality and form, exploring possible encounters between bodies and objects and the affective potential of abstraction. Inspired by Wassily Kandinsky’s thinking about geometrical lines and figures as vehicles that transport specific affects, Soulimenko makes cloth, ball, and square the protagonists of his performance.

A magical realism of form emerges: fingers crawl up the sides of the square like spiders, cloth and square become a kite and take flight, and ball enters the stage, elementary and self-contained. The performers facilitate this poetic dialogue between bodies and objects, playing with the range of associations, meanings and emotions that can be projected onto these seemingly abstract events. Through the ongoing construction and deconstruction of different situations on stage, Soulimenko reflects on our strive to look for the best order, the ideal composition of things – an ‘ideal world’ – a challenge that appears particularly daunting in the unpredictability and darkness of our times.