Tanzquartier Wien

In dance the bodies become political, at the same time the political becomes poetic. In Stranger Than Paradise this double game is played with extraordinary concentration. The title of this production is borrowed from a road movie that serves as an influence not aesthetically or narratively, rather atmospherically. In 1984, the director and author Jim Jarmusch sketched the tragicomic coexistence of three lonely characters as a choreography of wintry forlornness: exhausted bodies in wide, empty spaces, in “posthuman” scenarios. The idea of urban cool, which Jarmusch transfers to the snowy landscapes of Cleveland, is translated by Liquid Loft into a reflection on the expansion of biological capacities: into the mechanical, the creatural, and the “monstrous” of an animal-human existence.

The body is an obsolescent model; it is still needed, but the preparations for its abolition are in progress, which evokes melancholy and farewell manoeuvres. The old utopia of the equality of beings is hidden in the sphinxic shimmer of the dancers. Dealing with the humanimal raises questions of division and duplication. Is the image that the mirror produces an addition or a division? Does it share the view that is presented or is it simply duplicated?

Modification and infection are closely related: we are bio-machines, electronically improved, but biologically endangered. Only technologization, the synthesis of flesh and mechanics can secure us: The illusion of the human, which its perfectly reproduced surfaces can generate, conceals the artificiality of the new species. We will get used to them – that is, to ourselves.

— Stefan Grissemann