Tanzquartier Wien

Meyoucycle (me-you-cycle) is a political science fiction fantasy concert musical about expression in the age of hyper-capitalism and technological mediation. Personal ads and old-school letters, chat-bots, tweets, poetic terrorism, untameable rants, sound, image, song and dance collide in a rumination on contemporary and near-future life and the intense forces and interfaces that shape it.

The title “Meyoucycle” is a near homonym for “musical,” as if pronounced with a strange accent, which is to say that Meyoucycle creates something foreign to what can be identified as a musical, but with familiar ingredients. The piece combines music, dance, and text; and it seems to tell a story: in the near future, a group of poetic terrorists and emotional hackers have all dropped into anonymity. They dwell in the Dark – the dark web, the dark woods, the unknowns, the subconscious, the intuitive shadow of hidden knowledges. They escape the all-pervasive system of communications media that expropriates expressions between people and transforms it into profit. In order to maintain true freedom of expression and prevent that others profit from their every move, they choose to lose their identity and transform themselves constantly. Sliding through different genres of performance and music, inhabiting different forms of speech and physical appearance, they generate a continually shifting horizon of possible meanings, constantly escaping fixity.

Meyoucycle is a song-cycle written in collaboration between choreographer/performer Eleanor Bauer and musician/composer Chris Peck. Bauer and Peck have worked together for many years, over great distance. They learned to use the reality of distance and digital communication actively. Processing various source-materials from magazine articles to dreams, folding in three contributions from absent guest song-writers, developing the choreography with the performers and musical arrangements in dialogue with Ictus ensemble, the material itself is a churning cycle of me’s and you’s. As a “me-you-cycle,” the performance ultimately acknowledges that all understandings in the theater are created somewhere between the stage and the public.

„Anyone who leaves a performance by Jefta van Dinther has understood the meaning of synaesthesia.“ — Astrid Peterle

Dark Field Analysis calls upon the intensity of being alive by placing us humans in relation to other forms of life. In the performance, organic blends with synthetic, human with animal and material with ethereal. A long conversation unfolds between two naked men on a carpet; the topic of blood running as a red thread throughout the performance. Dark Field Analysis draws its name from a branch of alternative medicine that uses dark field microscopy to diagnose systemic bodily conditions originating in the blood. But the conversation between the two men encompasses more than medical facts. Here, blood serves as an analogy for looking inwards and outwards: Into and beyond our selves.

Watch trailer

„Comic genius … Gunn’s text is intricate and often brilliant, full of unpredictable digressions and curious factoids. It’s the verbal equivalent of skimming stones over water.“ Cameron Woodhead/The Age

Piece For Person and Ghetto Blaster is the story of a man, a woman and a duck. It dissects the excruciating realms of human behaviour by calling into question our capacity to make moral judgments and relate to others in an ethical way.

The work is disarmingly simple – exploring in great depth the moral conundrum of what should one do if one comes across a person throwing stones at a duck – but gradually becomes mind-bogglingly complex. Threaded between observations and memories of this brief encounter with a stranger are philosophical musings about peace and conflict, moral relativism, the ethics of intervention and the very function of art. Each new complication is layered into the mix until the ability to maintain different ethical and conceptual paradigms within one’s mind at the same time exhausts itself.

Accompanying the text is a rhythmic sound composition and an unpredictable choreography that shifts from the unnecessary and incongruous to the strangely affecting. The effect is of a mental rhythm playing onto and against a highly impulsive conflation of physical rhythms. Piece for Person and Ghetto Blaster slips across tempos, ideas and performance modes – from movement to dance to performance art and back again – to create something inescapably unique. The culmination of these multiple layers is a work in perpetual motion, full of wit, provocation and reflection.

Watch trailer

“They refer to Balanchine in an ironic celebration of beauty. The lyre becomes an executioner’s axe, god is a mechanical rodeo bull, and they take the road to Mount Parnassus by way of a polonaise coupled with dildos, definitely not unplugged. A superbly intelligent, fearless, terrific evening.” Egbert Tholl/Süddeutsche Zeitung

Florentina Holzinger has no reservations when it comes to remixing unusual genres in a fresh way. She has enriched the international performance scene with dizzying acrobatics, muscular women’s bodies and martial-arts fight scenes since 2011 – pop-cultural references and a penchant for trash included. In her latest work, Apollon, six naked women conquer George Balanchine’s neoclassical ballet of the same name from 1928 about the god of the arts and his three muses. But prancing around the poster boy of Olympus is not what Holzinger and her colleagues have in mind. They are themselves the stars of this show, and have some quite bizarre and daring tricks up their sleeves. Armed with black humour, elements of a circus freak show and 1960s live art, the performers challenge the neo-liberal cult of the body and its voyeuristic mechanisms. In pointe shoes and with Olympic weights on their shoulders, they push the vain god off his throne on Mount Parnassus.

“The different performers are working towards opening up their physical potentials. As the process develops, I realise more and more that even very small movements can be vehement. Normative perceptions and conceptions of energy and power are destabilised, shaken up.” Doris Uhlich

After the duet Ravemachine, Doris Uhlich creates individual and communal “forms of energy dance” in this ensemble piece for people with physical impairments. Every body has specific abilities to articulate its dynamism and its carnal pleasure. The movements themselves allow the body to charge itself up, acting as a kind of fuel produced naturally in the body. Every Body Electric is a radical invitation to explore potentials through the medium of dance, to make them visible and delve deep into an archaeology of energy. What else becomes possible if machines – such as wheelchairs, prostheses, crutches – are not perceived as obstacles but as extensions of the body and are also staged as such? Personal rhythms, dynamics, beats and physical characteristics result in very individual dance styles. Ultimately, the topical relevance of Every Body Electric but also its poetry, oscillating between gentle and forceful, lie in the way it alters both the self-awareness and the perception of these bodies.