Tanzquartier Wien

With every dance step, humanity also advances, barely noticeable, but consistently. Mankind looks back, relates to what has been and at the same time it moves forward. It is no coincidence that the art-historical references are just as decisive in the choreography of Stranger Than Paradise as is the latent futurism in the images, the figures, their drifting, their tics. Time is out of balance here, it appears boldly compressed, yet surprisingly re-developed and unfolded.

Liquid Loft’s productions of the past two years update each other: The former „Stand-Alones“ who only work with themselves are now moving closer together, albeit avoiding any contact; they glide silently past one another, only partially facing each other. The inner logic that they follow is a future one, the pathos of their bodies dampened by the serenity they are programmed for: fluid, fleeting characters, swaying in step, frozen in pain as if behind cold glass.

The images of the individuals, undissolved between animals, humans and machines, melt gently in the concave mirrors. Their surfaces generate illusions, do not throw back or reject, but rather invite people to pass through, to transit. Lewis Carroll’s Alice ends up in her Wonderland by going through the reflector, and also Jean Cocteau’s youthful poet in Le sang d’un poète falls into the abyss of a disturbing parallel world after jumping through the surface of the mirror-ocean. Behind the reflector lie opposite worlds, the unexpected, the preconscious. Illusion is merely the other side of “reality”, distortion the only way to recognizability. 

In the improvisational run-through of costumes and disguises, the desire for flexible, or if you will: liquid identities becomes clear. The colors glow, but the bodies are threatened to disappear behind them (as in the mirrors), to adapt, to blend in until they are invisible. The textiles help to keep changing directions, they assist with the desired course (and self-) corrections. In the sober white of the stage, the ensemble seems to be blurred: out of focus. The mirror shares emotions (and communicates them), but remains completely stoic itself. It doesn’t set a focus, acts egalitarian, because everything is equally valid in him. The actors, who loll in front of the distorted surfaces, blur into one another.

Stranger Than Paradise, set in sunken moods and deceptive images, is an elegy that, in a slowed-down configuration, marks the transition from one species to the next, and it is a reflection of the systematic expansion of human capacities into the mechanical, the animal, and sometimes the “monstrous “of a mixed animal-human existence. A series of cryptic poses, which in this work are carried out like secret agreements, form the prelude to a play of magnetism and fluctuation.  

Artificial intelligence, which is modeled on the natural but was designed to go beyond it at any time, will lead to the establishment of a new ethic that non-machines are demonstrably incapable of. The self-learning, cognitive apparatus that we put to our side make algorithmic decisions based on an incorruptible but highly problematic morality that chooses the lesser evil in any life-threatening situation. Whoever wants to save has to make sacrifices. The responsibility for the triage is delegated to the machine. It was eventually programmed to think for itself. That sounds paradoxical: self-determination being prescribed, autonomy required, and freedom being fastened. The structural contradiction that is found in this and the compulsion to achieve higher and higher levels of efficiency have made those who will replace humans very tired. Their ennui is tangible, but it throws off moments of ultimate beauty. 

The separation of body and feeling is almost impossible to achieve, although the risk of a permanently changeable identity radically undermines physical stability, even as it produces increased euphoria: I can be anything, including an object! The human development thrust once propagated by Friedrich Nietzsche inevitably leads, when viewed from the present, into an artificial cosmos, into machine art, into a Second Life that offers new “realities” and virtual identities.  

In paradise everything would seem strange (if only because it is so far away), but behind the liquid mirrors and beyond the anthropo-logic, strangeness is a wild understatement.