Tanzquartier Wien

Storm is a versatile artist who serves drama, sexiness, and camp. She uses drag as an outlet to express her emotions without having the fear of being judged or misunderstood.

The performance by Raymond Liew Jin Pin, in turn, provides an extraordinary insight into the work of an artist whose queer identity originated in a courageous act of self-development. As a child, Raymond’s mother dressed him up in a gold sequined dress and took him to a talent show – even though cross-dressing and homosexuality were and still are illegal and taboo in Malaysia. More than 20 years later, this moment serves as a starting point for a queer memory and a shared moment of identification with friends from the queer Southeast Asian diaspora.

On Friday, Ainhoa Hernández Escudero, bewitched by pop and mainstream culture, reflects on the mystical impulses behind our obsession with information technology. Her performance, The Torch, the Key, and the Snake, is the first piece of a broader choreographic project called Blooming –The Saga. This artistic research delves into science fiction and dreams and their potential to produce and manifest alternative realities. Ainhoa uses the imagery of witches, bouffons and pop divas to rethink collective spiritual practices from a feminist perspective and invites us to be possessed by spirits and creatures.

Bathing in Resonance by Aaron Josi Sternbauer is a multisensory performance and music experience that explores the profound connection between movement, sound, voice, and community. Water and bathing are used as symbols and tools, intending to immerse the audience in states of dissonance, harmony, and connectedness, drawing parallels to the endless waves in water.

In Avantika Tibrewala’s Trashed My title, a multidisciplinary dance and theatre performance, the artist questions the duality in perception around pop culture and its relationship with its consumers. The show challenges the audience to rethink their own consumption and the value they receive from trash culture and debunks the elite theories of high and low art.

‘How do we make social justice the most pleasurable human experience?’ This question, phrased by adrienne maree brown, is explored by Nina Sandino’s Elsewhere, thus creating a manifesto for holistic resistance. In this space, rest, pleasure, and joy work as radical tools for personal and collective empowerment. An hommage to Afro-Indigenous queer futurism, acknowledging that traditional practices are not relegated to the past but remain a vital and powerful force to shape the present and future. A joyful rebellion for self-preservation!

Chantal by Veza Fernández is an avant-garde anatomic spectacle in which Chantal opens her body, engaging with the audience in her own unique activist way. Chantal is a manifold of figures: a living anatomy doll or a lesbian Venus growing from her songs of broken hearts. Chantal is an essayistic, visceral concert that radically redesigns the dispositive of the anatomical theatre and explores what the staging of the inside beyond norms and dominant regimes of attention could mean.

Ell and Mary have been dead for three years, but now they’ve come back to life (and the stage) with one question on their minds: how do you know when it’s the end? Inspired by zombies, heartbreak, and the humble cockroach, The Last Show Before We Die by Ell Potters and Mary Higgins is an existential cabaret about the big things in life. And death.