Tanzquartier Wien

In Our Decline is a workshop format which hopes to share the research process and performance of Elsewhere Rhapsody while further dismantling the theories, methods, tools, and conclusions we likely, unconsciously, landed on. This is an evacuation! Put down those tools which only help build, tonight this shit comes down! Leaning into Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini’s Gender Without Identity, which proposes trauma as a deep aspect of our being and not just bad things which have happened to us but an accumulation of experiences which interrupt us. Here, they propose that tools are more aligned with projects and goals and less about becoming, which could be as close to desire as we can get. We will also consider Jack Halberstam’s notion of un-worlding, where participants of any genre or practice are invited to think through desire without its object, without their promises and at a certain necessary distance from the topic itself, which might render the feeling that this has nothing to do with desire at all! We might feel like we are roaming through an empty shopping mall or waiting in a lobby that is no longer in use.

The workshop led by Jen Rosenblit, Gærald Kurdian, Li Tavor and Colin Self is like an archaeological dig asking how close we can get to that ungovernable drive of desire and what other things step into focus along the way. Essentially, how does value function and change, and when is it more like stone? Through familiar, imagined, and enacted group scenarios, we will excavate the erotic as a public gathering. We will create dog show parkours, country line dance in the dirt while drinking our favourite beverages and reference the call of a fast-talking auctioneer to create an original song for the group as a polyphonic choir.

Is desire even to do with the attainment of what we want or rather merely emerging in the site of refusal, the break or end of something else? Is desire a thing in itself or possibly an absence of a thing, at last?

Considering desire as a cluster of failed promises, the work focuses on antiquity and value, ruins, and resurrection as a prosperous refusal of the elsewhere assigned to the concept of futurity. Should we simply call it quits right here? Shall we continue for said elsewhere or rather? Best to end it here?