Tanzquartier Wien

„Dance shares with speculative fiction a serious flirtation with history made flesh, made world through invention and structural mutation. Arising from a beautifully wounded present in search of something else, somewhere else, not utopia, and yet.” — Jenn Joy

Dancing’s Demons looks towards the complicated political histories of early Modern Dance and its resonance on the present. The contemporary dance theatre is re-imaged as a haunted ground in which the themes of the ecstatic and the demonic in 1920’s Ausdrucktanz are re-activated while questioning the ideological National narratives that Early Modern Dance was wrestling with.

In her autobiography Mary Wigman wrote, “after a dance is performed, it is dead.” The witches, demon machines, and ecstasies of Ausdrucktanz are not resuscitated in order to celebrate them. Rather Dancing’s Demons intuits for the “something to be done” that lives in uncanny folds, such as the one perceived between experimental dance of the 1920’s and the 2020’s.