Tanzquartier Wien

„She’s a simply phenomenal performer … a raw, switched-on, fragmented and yet meticulously detailed performance, swift and clear and full of sharp body language underpinned by a blistering, intuitive intelligence.“ — The Times

„A powerful stage presence … there’s nothing usual about Doherty … This is dance with grit in its veins, with dirt under its fingernails and a violent secret in its heart.“ — The Scotsman

„The rhythm that the boys give off in the street. The way that they move their feet, the kind of posturing they’re doing: there’s an energy coming off them that’s really frightening. People don’t look at them and I think we need to look. I think the world needs a bit more love.“ — Oona Doherty

One mans hunting. A thumping nackerd car
head lights on
sits in waiting,
Music thumping from its metal shield
A man who is many men leeks in and out of the metal beat,
his story, A hunt for hope.

Doherty mutates into separate entireties. Morphing from one character to the next. Through speech, movement, and sound we are twisted and contorted through ideas of masculinity, morality and nostalgia. Through wet forgotten roads of memory; the Hunter drags us through a dirty Europe. He hits and swerves at extreme stereotypes of cultural and social class. The masks of men as a form of personal defence against the self and the world we live in today. The consequences of boredom on the psyche are ripped open through physical labour on stage. Hopes, dreams and ambitions are parked up in shoddy car parks. To find self-belief. No matter where you are from, what class you are placed. There are essential needs of love ingrained in all of us.

To find the common ground. To sweat to truth.
Fade to white
Lazarus rising as the concrete bird of paradise.

An attempt to deconstruct the stereotype of the concrete disadvantaged male, and raise it up into a Caravaggio bright white limbo. To make the smicks, the spides, the hoods, the gypsies, the knackers, the neds, the delinquents into the birds of paradise.

It is a hunt for hope.

A pictorial-cinematic choreography. A solo female body in relation to the ambiguity of its own image. A contemplation on the gaze of spectatorship. It is a solo with many, a solo with all affirming and equal objects and subjects – microphone, camera, screen, light, performer and audience. A moment to place the awareness on the possibilities of the body as a vessel for shifting perspectives. A dive into the space of possibilities between the representation of an image and its manifestation, between virtual imagining and actual in/visibility. A dazzling, multi-layered mix of video, text, singing and movement.

“When I work with the canvas of the theatre, I try to reach for fertilizing our senses so that the experience of the viewer zooms in an out, stretches right and left of that enclosed frame and beyond. Enabling the periphery and surroundings, breaking the hierarchy of the performing object, subject and the centre of stage. I would like to honor the tactile, the surfaces and the skins as gates to the 3D, multi-D, touchable and oily.” — Andrea Zavala Folache

Knuckles become clouds marks the beginning of an artistic process during which Anna Prokopová, Costas Kekis and Andrea Gunnlaugsdóttir experiment with human experience. The first instalment is about human/human and human/other species interaction. A central aspect in this are humans as prosthetic creatures. What is a posthuman body capable of doing? How does a posthuman brain work? The three performers go on an affective journey in search of answers to these questions. Not only do they share a physical practice but also a language based on memory, imagination and immediate sensory input. In the process, the body and language become tools that serve to cast a precise look on human beings, their characteristic forms of communication, their social significance and their affective capital.

„She’s a simply phenomenal performer … a raw, switched-on, fragmented and yet meticulously detailed performance, swift and clear and full of sharp body language underpinned by a blistering, intuitive intelligence.“ — The Times

„A powerful stage presence … there’s nothing usual about Doherty … This is dance with grit in its veins, with dirt under its fingernails and a violent secret in its heart.“ — The Scotsman

„The rhythm that the boys give off in the street. The way that they move their feet, the kind of posturing they’re doing: there’s an energy coming off them that’s really frightening. People don’t look at them and I think we need to look. I think the world needs a bit more love.“ — Oona Doherty

One mans hunting. A thumping nackerd car
head lights on
sits in waiting,
Music thumping from its metal shield
A man who is many men leeks in and out of the metal beat,
his story, A hunt for hope.

Doherty mutates into separate entireties. Morphing from one character to the next. Through speech, movement, and sound we are twisted and contorted through ideas of masculinity, morality and nostalgia. Through wet forgotten roads of memory; the Hunter drags us through a dirty Europe. He hits and swerves at extreme stereotypes of cultural and social class. The masks of men as a form of personal defence against the self and the world we live in today. The consequences of boredom on the psyche are ripped open through physical labour on stage. Hopes, dreams and ambitions are parked up in shoddy car parks. To find self-belief. No matter where you are from, what class you are placed. There are essential needs of love ingrained in all of us.

To find the common ground. To sweat to truth.
Fade to white
Lazarus rising as the concrete bird of paradise.

An attempt to deconstruct the stereotype of the concrete disadvantaged male, and raise it up into a Caravaggio bright white limbo. To make the smicks, the spides, the hoods, the gypsies, the knackers, the neds, the delinquents into the birds of paradise.

It is a hunt for hope.

A pictorial-cinematic choreography. A solo female body in relation to the ambiguity of its own image. A contemplation on the gaze of spectatorship. It is a solo with many, a solo with all affirming and equal objects and subjects – microphone, camera, screen, light, performer and audience. A moment to place the awareness on the possibilities of the body as a vessel for shifting perspectives. A dive into the space of possibilities between the representation of an image and its manifestation, between virtual imagining and actual in/visibility. A dazzling, multi-layered mix of video, text, singing and movement.

“When I work with the canvas of the theatre, I try to reach for fertilizing our senses so that the experience of the viewer zooms in an out, stretches right and left of that enclosed frame and beyond. Enabling the periphery and surroundings, breaking the hierarchy of the performing object, subject and the centre of stage. I would like to honor the tactile, the surfaces and the skins as gates to the 3D, multi-D, touchable and oily.” — Andrea Zavala Folache

Knuckles become clouds marks the beginning of an artistic process during which Anna Prokopová, Costas Kekis and Andrea Gunnlaugsdóttir experiment with human experience. The first instalment is about human/human and human/other species interaction. A central aspect in this are humans as prosthetic creatures. What is a posthuman body capable of doing? How does a posthuman brain work? The three performers go on an affective journey in search of answers to these questions. Not only do they share a physical practice but also a language based on memory, imagination and immediate sensory input. In the process, the body and language become tools that serve to cast a precise look on human beings, their characteristic forms of communication, their social significance and their affective capital.

“I declare myself as a hole and as a worker of the asshole.” — Paul Preciado, Contrasexual Manifesto

The dichotomy of active versus passive is still defined by a marked hierarchical divide not only in heterosexual contexts but in homosexual and queer contexts as well. While the active position (top) implies a sense of strength and invulnerability, especially in a sexual context, passivity (bottom) has a weak and oppressed status both in society and language. Benedikt Silvia Smegmer counters this with A Passivist Manifesto. It no longer suffices to make everybody active. Passivity must be reassessed as an emancipatory position. Activism has had its day. The hole rises and strikes back. The hole devours and spits out. The hole encloses benignly and voraciously. It has already wrapped itself around you.

The solo performance My garden flourishes with flowers takes place in an imaginative world where a Black queer body emulates an existing reality, a dream like state. Through communal and personal rituals and by using their body as vessel for emerging narratives Mzamo Nondlwana playfully attempts the deconstruction of linear concepts of time, merging the past, the present and the future. While the boundaries between personal memories and imagined realities blur, the audience is invited to witness this mystical journey of re-membering, while at the same time the viewer is asked to confront their own perceptions of black bodies – and to challenge processes of othering, fetishisation and objectification. My garden flourishes with flowers centers around embodied self-determined Black subjectivity by focusing on elements of empowerment and self-expression, utopian notions and the power of imagination.

Re re me me mbra mbra ne ne whe whe n n
the the he he ad ad
the the he he art art
the the who who le le bo bo dy dy
wou wou ld ld al al l l be be in in one one pla pla ce ce
at at the the sa sa me me ti ti me me

In a bent world a lonely cowgirl finds her unexpected expression in rage, loneliness and self-destruction. REMEMBRANE investigates how movement and words can become accelerated tools for blurring the lines between existence and the imagination and what that means in the context of the theater. It is a multi-layered body glitch enquiring what it means to be one entity while being many and the complexity of shifting between combat and serenity, identity and the search for one, brokenness and a whole.

The piece emerged from an interest in trying to objectify my own body while questioning objectification and ownership of the fe-male body. How can I reclaim my body and still understand it as something that I am not entitled to own or have full control over.

“I declare myself as a hole and as a worker of the asshole.” — Paul Preciado, Contrasexual Manifesto

The dichotomy of active versus passive is still defined by a marked hierarchical divide not only in heterosexual contexts but in homosexual and queer contexts as well. While the active position (top) implies a sense of strength and invulnerability, especially in a sexual context, passivity (bottom) has a weak and oppressed status both in society and language. Benedikt Silvia Smegmer counters this with A Passivist Manifesto. It no longer suffices to make everybody active. Passivity must be reassessed as an emancipatory position. Activism has had its day. The hole rises and strikes back. The hole devours and spits out. The hole encloses benignly and voraciously. It has already wrapped itself around you.

The solo performance My garden flourishes with flowers takes place in an imaginative world where a Black queer body emulates an existing reality, a dream like state. Through communal and personal rituals and by using their body as vessel for emerging narratives Mzamo Nondlwana playfully attempts the deconstruction of linear concepts of time, merging the past, the present and the future. While the boundaries between personal memories and imagined realities blur, the audience is invited to witness this mystical journey of re-membering, while at the same time the viewer is asked to confront their own perceptions of black bodies – and to challenge processes of othering, fetishisation and objectification. My garden flourishes with flowers centers around embodied self-determined Black subjectivity by focusing on elements of empowerment and self-expression, utopian notions and the power of imagination.

Re re me me mbra mbra ne ne whe whe n n
the the he he ad ad
the the he he art art
the the who who le le bo bo dy dy
wou wou ld ld al al l l be be in in one one pla pla ce ce
at at the the sa sa me me ti ti me me

In a bent world a lonely cowgirl finds her unexpected expression in rage, loneliness and self-destruction. REMEMBRANE investigates how movement and words can become accelerated tools for blurring the lines between existence and the imagination and what that means in the context of the theater. It is a multi-layered body glitch enquiring what it means to be one entity while being many and the complexity of shifting between combat and serenity, identity and the search for one, brokenness and a whole.

The piece emerged from an interest in trying to objectify my own body while questioning objectification and ownership of the fe-male body. How can I reclaim my body and still understand it as something that I am not entitled to own or have full control over.