Tanzquartier Wien

After being apart for several years, son and mother reunite again on stage. The Power (of) The Fragile is a meeting of two worlds, two bodies, two minds. Latifa always dreamt of being a dancer, Mohamed made it his profession. The borders of their bodies blur, making it hard to decipher where one ends and the other starts. Their lives and dreams start to merge, and only time claims its space between mother and son.

The Power (of) The Fragile is a collection of images and reflections on what the relationship between mother and son can look like and what it means to be home and go away. It is a performance about movement, of bodies and people, about weight and what it means to carry weight, about being together and apart. It is a tender portrait of a close relationship and a pamphlet for our right to go wherever we want.

A shoe listens to the sound of steps and instantly dissolves into thin air. A gesture disappears before it can emerge. Some background activity can be seen in detail. how, on floors tickles the feet of dance. This dance starts out hesitantly, like a proposal, until it comes into being. Misty-eyed looks, a hose, utopian space. A word hiding from itself only to be discovered between the pages. The resurrection of an image, lost without being looked at. Floating flakes, the white noise of sound.

how, on floors shortens the distance between places without putting presence before absence. It requires the kind of attention that allows multiple things to happen at once. Tutto ha inizio nel 1978, or an alternative beginning. This performance whispers into dust’s ear, trying to understand the particles before they form a coherent image. Hair will be swallowed and become part of something more. Transformed into the element of dust, an amalgamation of living and dead things. Dust needs a place to congregate. Dust records the passing of time and directs our attention to objects’ contours and atmospheres.

After being apart for several years, son and mother reunite again on stage. The Power (of) The Fragile is a meeting of two worlds, two bodies, two minds. Latifa always dreamt of being a dancer, Mohamed made it his profession. The borders of their bodies blur, making it hard to decipher where one ends and the other starts. Their lives and dreams start to merge, and only time claims its space between mother and son.

The Power (of) The Fragile is a collection of images and reflections on what the relationship between mother and son can look like and what it means to be home and go away. It is a performance about movement, of bodies and people, about weight and what it means to carry weight, about being together and apart. It is a tender portrait of a close relationship and a pamphlet for our right to go wherever we want.

A shoe listens to the sound of steps and instantly dissolves into thin air. A gesture disappears before it can emerge. Some background activity can be seen in detail. how, on floors tickles the feet of dance. This dance starts out hesitantly, like a proposal, until it comes into being. Misty-eyed looks, a hose, utopian space. A word hiding from itself only to be discovered between the pages. The resurrection of an image, lost without being looked at. Floating flakes, the white noise of sound.

how, on floors shortens the distance between places without putting presence before absence. It requires the kind of attention that allows multiple things to happen at once. Tutto ha inizio nel 1978, or an alternative beginning. This performance whispers into dust’s ear, trying to understand the particles before they form a coherent image. Hair will be swallowed and become part of something more. Transformed into the element of dust, an amalgamation of living and dead things. Dust needs a place to congregate. Dust records the passing of time and directs our attention to objects’ contours and atmospheres.

The Many Piece is a piece of the many. by many. with many. for many. In The Many Piece, choreographies are imagined as materials that can be combined, fragmented, reassembled, interwoven, and can lean against one another. Lena Schattenberg asked numerous choreographers to send her scores in any format. In direct and playful dialogue with light and sound, a landscape emerges that unites people and materials, opening up a space for a body that communicates, (dis)places itself, lingers, and negotiates. The Many Piece is a dance that requires Lena Schattenberg to follow her desire, moment for moment, remembering the past whilst also imaging an exciting future; collapsing histories, and breathing new life into gifted movements.

Spaziergang bei Nacht is a duet by Susanne Songi Griem and musician* Pete Prison IV that addresses the constant alterations of internal set-ups by external circumstances. Inspired by the themes of spring and departure, both performers interpret the complexity of change, solitude, discomfort, and compassion in a green landscape. Alternately, they move between individual improvisation and shared memory.

Susanne Songi Griem combines movement, sound, language, objects, and gaze in her pieces, creating a carefully woven web of diverse elements that enables moments of special immediacy.

The Many Piece is a piece of the many. by many. with many. for many. In The Many Piece, choreographies are imagined as materials that can be combined, fragmented, reassembled, interwoven, and can lean against one another. Lena Schattenberg asked numerous choreographers to send her scores in any format. In direct and playful dialogue with light and sound, a landscape emerges that unites people and materials, opening up a space for a body that communicates, (dis)places itself, lingers, and negotiates. The Many Piece is a dance that requires Lena Schattenberg to follow her desire, moment for moment, remembering the past whilst also imaging an exciting future; collapsing histories, and breathing new life into gifted movements.

Spaziergang bei Nacht is a duet by Susanne Songi Griem and musician* Pete Prison IV that addresses the constant alterations of internal set-ups by external circumstances. Inspired by the themes of spring and departure, both performers interpret the complexity of change, solitude, discomfort, and compassion in a green landscape. Alternately, they move between individual improvisation and shared memory.

Susanne Songi Griem combines movement, sound, language, objects, and gaze in her pieces, creating a carefully woven web of diverse elements that enables moments of special immediacy.

Glistening bronze through time or bright cis-white, fabulous muscles have always taken our breath away. Always inadequate in the shadow of their brilliance, the question isn’t so much what they do to us, but why we keep staring. Fixated, caner teker inserts themself into the nexus of desire, humiliation, and violence otherwise known as masculinity. A self-appointed impostor, their fraudulence at best confounds, at worst conceals, the binary distinctions between what is and isn’t, European or Turkish, male or female, gay or straight: queer, as the kids these days call it.

Based on the movements of traditional Turkish oil wrestling or Yağlı Güreş, KIRKPINAR is both a performance and an ongoing research project that restages ostensible acts of aggression not only as gestures of intimacy but also as a ritualistic form of work. In a makeshift wrestling ring, caner teker and Élie Autin softly sift their way through a series of predetermined postures at a tempo determined by their muscular endurance. Unrelenting, they slowly build a tension that knows no climax.

But it’s hardly a secret that even the most violent sports harbour moments of physical intimacy and tiresome labor, least of all for sportsmen. Far from revealing what’s hidden in plain sight, KIRKPINAR is perhaps better seen as a projection of the men we should prefer to see: all tender touches and reciprocal support. More echo chamber than a microscope, it confronts us with the contradictions and silences of our desire. Again and in other words, it asks us to ask ourselves why we keep staring.

Curated by Lewon Heublein

blackmilk is the first part of a trilogy titled trompoppies. “Trompoppies” is Afrikaans and describes drum majorettes performing a formation dance in uniform. blackmilk examines one of the choreographic elements of these dances: the precise hand gestures. By merging trompoppies movements with the melodramatic gestures of divas and the gestures associated with black male rap stars, the choreography investigates the distance between African and African American male identity. blackmilk invites a performative dimension into a cultural representation of black masculinity and opens it up to different complexity and sensitivity, which the artist describes as black male melancholia.

Glistening bronze through time or bright cis-white, fabulous muscles have always taken our breath away. Always inadequate in the shadow of their brilliance, the question isn’t so much what they do to us, but why we keep staring. Fixated, caner teker inserts themself into the nexus of desire, humiliation, and violence otherwise known as masculinity. A self-appointed impostor, their fraudulence at best confounds, at worst conceals, the binary distinctions between what is and isn’t, European or Turkish, male or female, gay or straight: queer, as the kids these days call it.

Based on the movements of traditional Turkish oil wrestling or Yağlı Güreş, KIRKPINAR is both a performance and an ongoing research project that restages ostensible acts of aggression not only as gestures of intimacy but also as a ritualistic form of work. In a makeshift wrestling ring, caner teker and Élie Autin softly sift their way through a series of predetermined postures at a tempo determined by their muscular endurance. Unrelenting, they slowly build a tension that knows no climax.

But it’s hardly a secret that even the most violent sports harbour moments of physical intimacy and tiresome labor, least of all for sportsmen. Far from revealing what’s hidden in plain sight, KIRKPINAR is perhaps better seen as a projection of the men we should prefer to see: all tender touches and reciprocal support. More echo chamber than a microscope, it confronts us with the contradictions and silences of our desire. Again and in other words, it asks us to ask ourselves why we keep staring.

Curated by Lewon Heublein

blackmilk is the first part of a trilogy titled trompoppies. “Trompoppies” is Afrikaans and describes drum majorettes performing a formation dance in uniform. blackmilk examines one of the choreographic elements of these dances: the precise hand gestures. By merging trompoppies movements with the melodramatic gestures of divas and the gestures associated with black male rap stars, the choreography investigates the distance between African and African American male identity. blackmilk invites a performative dimension into a cultural representation of black masculinity and opens it up to different complexity and sensitivity, which the artist describes as black male melancholia.