Tanzquartier Wien

Deborah Hay is known as one of the most influential choreographers of postmodern dance in the 20^th and 21^st century. She was a founding member of the experimental Judson Dance Theater and toured with the world-renowned Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Her creative energy, her methods and artistic practices are still a source of great inspiration for generations of young dancers today. In late February, this legend of choreography will present two new productions at Tanzquartier Wien.

Animals on the Beach

They look like animals on the beach, thought Deborah Hay as she observed workshop participants and didn’t really know what she was seeing: it was precise, but also poetic and enigmatic. The association led Hay to the title of her new piece, Animals on the Beach, in which she has collaborated with five outstanding dancers familiar with the intimacy and stringency of her performance practice, and who have also contributed their own knowledge. For Deborah Hay is less interested in the movement than the person dancing and the relationships that create this dance.

my choreographed body … revisited

50 years’ practice has deeply choreographed Deborah Hay as an artist. In order to preserve her interest in dance, Hay has continually re-invented how she engages in it. Her new solo, my choreographed body… revisited, a tribute to this wealth of experience – Hay is without the compositional edifice that previously determined one solo from the Other.

“Liberating the imagination is at the heart of my research, whatever form it takes.” — Nacera Belaza

Le Cercle invites us to a space between the detached rigour of Sufism, the circularity of break-dance battles, and the almost mathematical precision of a certain modernism. The movements of the dancers are transported by a force that is fluid, yet structured, as if borne from below by a deep and continuous breath. Bearing both the legacy of traditional forms and the abstraction of contemporary dance, the practice of Nacera Belaza, defies any attempt at classification and description. In Le Cercle she reinterprets the motif of a past choreography like a musician develops the theme of a symphony, by exposing buried variants. The choreography fills us with a sense of freedom, allowing the dancers to erase the individuality behind this movement in continuous variation. They stand like silhouettes at the edge of a circle of light, raising a political question about what it means to be visible.

“Feminism, of course, has always been an exercise in science fiction.” — Laurie Penny

After five sold-out performances in October, the cult show returns to its place of creation. TANZ completes Florentina Holzinger’s trilogy about the body as a spectacle, and its disciplining. A ballet class under the direction of Beatrice Cordua, the first ballerina to dance Le sacre de printemps naked (John Neumeier’s Le Sacre, 1972), provides the framework for TANZ. The performers undergo rigorous training in “action ballet”, the so-called “sylphic studies”. In joint rituals, they learn to master their bodies and minds, and they acquire supernatural powers, such as flying. A quest for perfection in an ephemeral world, during which the gross is transformed into the sublime. In an operatic setting, brutal parodies of sensationalist images emerge, as seen in ballet, comedy and pornography. The gaze regime finds reflection in the character of a porn producer who documents the performance. With a cast of women between the ages of twenty and eighty, all of whom have different backgrounds in dance, TANZ raises the question of the legacy of dance. How can the cult of beauty inherent in this tradition be reconciled?

Alexandra Bachzetsis draws from histories of art, music, cinema, popular culture and fashion, and projects them onto the body. Through this method of citation, Bachzetsis considers how our bodies are used and can be activated in today’s increasingly polarizing discussions around identity and body politics.

In Chasing a Ghost, Bachzetsis continuously creates a double—a double body, a double sound, a double space, a double image. Challenging the choreographic archetype of the duet, Chasing a Ghost stages these doubles within a spectrum of violence and desire. Central to this duality, a double in of itself, is the notion of the uncanny: an estranging phenomenon in a seemingly ordinary context, but also the potential act of transgression as our repressed impulses and subconsciousness may at any time rupture into our experience of reality.

Chasing a Ghost encompasses a choreography for five dancers (including the artist herself), an original music score played live by two pianists, and a stage setting that shifts between live movement and moving image. These elements are in constant relationship to each other, but the connections between them are intentionally disturbed. As such, Bachzetsis transforms the duet into an unsettling image, the movement between two bodies a distressing and unexpected occurrence, a perpetual “folie-à-deux” that challenges how we look at ourselves and others.

“And yet there is something esthetic about laughter, since the comic comes into being just when society and the individual, freed from the worry of self-preservation, begin to regard themselves as works of art.” — Henri Bergson, Laughter (1900)

“Little by little, laughter becomes an absolute norm […] The dancers give the fatal impression that something of humanity ends up being lost.” — Libération

Augusto is about the human desire for unconditional love and about the pain that goes with it. But it also pays tribute to the clown character of Auguste – the circus’s loser, the fool who cannot stop laughing even when things look dire.

Laughter is only being made possible by the interaction of a totality of eighty muscles in our body, by the modality of our voice and the dance-like contractions of our diaphragmatic region. But there are many more facets to laughter than just the simple physiological aspects. In Augusto, the voice, body and movement-based research by award-winning Italian choreographer Alessandro Sciarroni, nine dancers will only be equipped with one mode of expression: laughter. Whatever the state they are in – if they walk, run or dance, if they feel sad, excited, anxious or if they are hurting – there will only be obsessive laughter. A laughter without specific cause, totally uncontrollable, at the threshold of pain.

Watch trailer