Tanzquartier Wien

There have and will always be events that make the future of dance and performance their subject. At Tanzquartier, for example, there was a marathon event series in 2008, which saw 50 different artists, curators and theorists give one-hour accounts of their visions. However, in 2021, finding answers to the questions pertaining to our future has never been so urgent a matter since the opening of Tanzquartier. What happens to a discipline when a pandemic challenges its most basic premise: the precondition that audience and performers can share a space together to experience, exchange and discuss? Was all this just a temporary glitch of waiting and postponing, a time of moving everything last-minute to the digital sphere and of waiting endlessly to return to live events with real physical intimacy, or will we soon have to face the pandemic’s long-term consequences? Do we even need the experience of live bodies anymore, or do we need this experience more than ever? Can performance help us cope with these changes? In this lab, which will be open to the public on November 11, artists from different backgrounds, generations and artistic practices will explore and emphasize why live performance art cannot be replaced.