Tanzquartier Wien

„One is as if transported through the dust of time, in a tranquil dream and of a great richness, on the verge of reaching a truth which always escapes, finally opening up to an infinitely poetic prophecy.“ — Thomas Adam-Garnung, Ballroom Revue

The Quiet brings together five women in an unsettling choreography of the ordinary. They are quiet in action, set in motion by expressions of oral traditions. Reciting, chanting and praying, they forcefully move into and out of defined and defining patterns, propelling the quotidian into transcendence. By calling attention to that which is transmitted across generations, The Quiet engages with time in some of its overlooked forms: the taking of time, the passing of time, the falling out of time.

Together with the dancers Lisa Drake, Kristine Slettevold, Alexandra Campbell, Agnieszka Długoszewska, and Cecilia Roos as well as his longstanding collaborators Minna Tiikkainen, David Kiers, and Cristina Nyffeler, Jefta van Dinther continues the intertwining of space, sound, light and body that characterizes his choreographies.

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„For many years, I’ve been thinking about ghosts as unfinished business, and the way in which unresolved conflicts affect both our presence and our movements. Our bodies are constantly shuttling between objects, sounds, lights, voices and unprocessed events from the past. This might awaken a dormant presence, whether we like it or not.“ — Meg Stuart

For Celestial Sorrow, Meg Stuart collaborates for the first time with Indonesian visual artist Jompet Kuswidananto. Departing from possession and implanted fictional traumas, they create a vibrant world of light and movement, inhabited by three performers and two musicians. Together the group embarks on an exploratory journey, moving through imaginary and invisible spaces, and the voices that make them resonate.

Habitat / Halle E is Doris Uhlich’s biggest choreography in open space to date. The naked bodies of 120 people flick, vibrate and slap against each other to electronic sounds and abstract techno tracks. The performers celebrate their unity in diversity. As individuals and as a crowd at the same time they conquer the space in a choreography that is captivating, highly energetic and, at times, collectively reposing. Hall E is transformed into a “habitat” full of unexpected life forms – the audience moves about freely in the available space. Habitat transcends conventional ideas of the body, of dance and of nakedness in a subversive manner. Habitat is a utopia. A shameless but also a free-of-shame hymn to a naked body beyond cultural inscriptions and conventional ideals of beauty. The body is not devalued to the level of a fetish, an object; and carnality is neither metaphorically nor poetically ideologised but understood in a material sense and is therefore presented in all its mass and weight yet also in its fragility.

When Ludwig van Beethoven wrote his String Quartet No. 15 in A minor, op. 132 in Vienna almost two centuries ago, the composer was almost completely deaf. For Danza Permanente, choreographer DD Dorvillier and composer Zeena Parkins have translated compositional structures and tonal qualities of the score into dance movements. The four dancers are each assigned to one of the four instruments. The choreography follows the musical notation down to the finest nuances and interweaves the dancing voices into an intense and dynamic stream of movement. The dancers are music made visible without the music being audible.

New York multi-instrumentalist Zeena Parkins is a pioneer of contemporary harp-playing. In the second part of the evening she presents her latest composition, Captiva, at Tanzquartier Wien. The Captiva pieces are based on a system of simple rules that, when combined, offer unlimited possibilities of musical development. Following a cosmic pattern, each individual sound makes space for the next. Captiva evolves with each concert, containing all past versions while pointing to future ones at the same time.

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

Florentina Holzinger has enriched the international performance scene with dizzying acrobatics, muscular women’s bodies and martial-arts fight scenes since 2011 – a generous helping of pop-cultural references and a penchant for trash included. TANZ completes her trilogy – Recovery and Apollon were the first two parts – 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?

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