Tanzquartier Wien

For the first time, choreographer Ian Kaler has created a big stage production for Cullbergbaletten. ON THE CUSP will be a mix of live-practicing and synchronized movements, a spectrum of emotions and projections. It will be a combined live and video work dealing with a series of different topics. The work presents a collection of portraits of the individuals as well as of the group. Every dancer has their own story, and the company connects them. Who are the people in the group and how do they construct this group? Are they characters or do they want to play a certain role? Shifting between different kinds of characters, who are they in private and how are the stage characters affected by this? The music of electronically synthesized brass sound composed by Planningtorock will create bold, dramatic, playful and deeply moving dance pieces.

Out of the darkness of the stage, a procession of images step into the light, setting performers and objects in motion. Seemingly unconnected figures, sculptures, tableaux vivants claim their ground like theatrical creatures. Mystery Magnet sketches out a haunted world where humour is born from sadness and magic from the prosaic. The Belgian visual artist and theatre maker Miet Warlop has created another show made of moments of fragile illusionism, where fantasy and reality coexist. Mystery Magnet channels the contemporary surreal, a terrain where freakish cuteness and desensitised cruelty, glittering promises and unstoppable destruction share a common space.

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Kat Válastur’s production is a choreographic essay on crude oil dependence by Western societies. The Berlin choreographer places three dancers into an adventurous game called OILinity, letting them wander through a landscape animated by petroleum, and situated in a sculptural obstacle course. Its core is the “spinning melancholy”, a cylindrical object that has nothing more in mind than preserving its own system.

With forceful movements, meticulous choreography, and black humour, OILinity confronts the audience with a dance work that reveals the hidden human traits as well as those of petroleum, finding a vocabulary of movement in which forces and speeds culminate in the crude beauty of dripping oil.

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For the latest instalment in the series Foreign Tongues, Liquid Loft has collected a wide array of sound recordings of regional dialects and languages from Europe, composing an incredible library of language. Using different techniques of phonetics and rhythm, the resulting collection has been turned into a dance performance. All material can be used tonally as part of an acoustic setting and as part of a library of language: rustling of leaves, gravel scrunching and other sounds resulting from surface friction of materials such as concrete, glass and paper. In Models of Reality, the mutation of sounds, their solidification as part of a spatial order, articulates an acoustic response to the present bodies. The assemblage of noise and sounds makes for an atmosphere and basis of imaginary space in which everything centres around the human body – as the “main character of all utopian ideas” (Foucault). Models of Reality attempts to be a localisation and topography of the body by means of an imaginary cartography.

Art, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida suggests, depends on its framework, which defines what can be seen. In her new piece, Private Song, artist and choreographer Alexandra Bachzetsis proposes ‘framing’ as a perceptive strategy in order to examine, underline or neutralise the relationship between audience and the bodies on the stage. To this end she draws on apparently heterogeneous sources, confronting the singular voices and codified gestures of popular Greek rebetiko songs with wrestling, Hollywood role models and the visual history of love and war.