Ah, summer in Vienna… Where tourists are lured into endless reproductions of Mozart concerts by ticket sellers in Baroque wigs. The local dance scene couldn’t be more different: if you like to tread beaten paths, you have come to the wrong place. For over four decades, ImPulsTanz has been programming daring dance in Vienna under the unchanged directorship of Karl Regensburger, presenting performance experiments that fail as often as they succeed, that challenge, or that get a second chance with the public. The festival is a total experience, with a programme that consists not only of shows but also workshops, discussions, residencies, exhibitions, films and parties. For one month in the peak of summer, Vienna’s MuseumsQuartier transforms into their headquarters and becomes a bustling beehive in which choreographers, dancers and art enthusiasts nest or just pass through, making the entire city buzz. The lineup is refreshing and curiosity-inducing; most of the choreographers’ names sound unfamiliar to me. I dove into the programme headfirst and got in touch with these dancemakers.
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ImPulsTanz 2024 #1: dancers that touch you
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10 min
Sometimes literally, as with Deva Schubert. While I watched her Glitch Choir from the floor of mumok, museum of modern art, I sensed her movements behind me and suddenly felt her inner thighs opening up and sliding down my back. Schubert and her co-performer Chihiro Araki allow public and private spheres to collide, travelling through the audience and relying on random spectators to support their collapses. They fill the space simultaneously with movement and chant, a lamentation song amplified by microphones and echoes on the walls. Layers, directions and qualities of singing stack up and build a bewildering, distorted soundscape. When the performers press their lips together, and cry ‘into’ each other, their own vibrating bodies become the bearers of the mourning at an unsettling, alienating frequency. With this performance Schubert powerfully stimulates our 360 degree awareness and sensory orientation, invoking an intimate experience in the least obvious of environments, using the empty, cold and spacious exhibition hall to great effect.
That same space was working against Eszter Salamon in her solo Dance for Nothing (Revisited). Also essentially building on voice, this reworked lecture-performance based on her Dance for Nothing from 2010, with texts from John Cage’s Lecture on Nothing (1949), can’t hit the spot due to sound issues. Salamon’s words are nearly unintelligible because of the echoes, and so all we can do is read the text from her abstract gestures, an exercise in transmission and interpretation. Dressed all in black, she uses her fingers to draw imaginary lines on her body and in the direct space around her. With her fingers circled around her eyes and her elbows bobbing up and down like wings, she’s perched on her chair like an owl, hooting obscure wisdom.
Salamon performs her second piece in this festival alongside her mother Erzsébet Gyarmati. MONUMENT 0.7: M/OTHERS feels much more engaging due to the universal theme of parental relationships. Still in the same exhibition hall, but now on a 3×3 metre carpet in quadrifrontal configuration, Salamon retreats into a more intimate setting. Mother and daughter, who resemble each other strikingly, mimic each other’s movements slowly and with precision. It’s as if they are on two sides of an imaginary mirror, a window to the past or the future, depending on perspective. The two shift through endless reconfigurations, caring for and carrying each other, and become a third integrated body in their co-presence. There’s tenderness in the duo’s interactions, but it doesn’t take very long before this chain of silent poses feels long-winded. Salamon seems to deliberately avoid structure, or to constantly be in search of it, which manifests in one of her few lines of text: ‘Composition is not there, it is going to be there, and we are here.’
Structure is integral to Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Radouan Mriziga’s new collaboration Il Cimento dell’Armonia e dell’Inventione, ‘the contest between harmony and invention’, referring to Antonio Vivaldi’s collection of 12 concertos which includes his famous Four Seasons. Divided in distinctive acts, four men perform meticulous steps and turns that flow with the logic of solving a mathematical problem; each movement poses a question and provides an answer, pushing forward a line of reasoning. Sometimes very concrete mimicry creeps in their movement vocabulary, like shooting, scything, fencing, and horseback riding, identifiable remains of a deconstructed past. Moments of visual and auditory grace are interspersed with funny scenes, like Vivaldi’s spring theme in body percussion, a dance in dropped pants, and a song of barks. Dancer Nassim Baddag delivers the most stunning part of the evening, when his spinning breakdance seems to set a hurricane in motion, carrying the other dancers along like sailboats in a storm.
By virtue of its technical ingenuity, IN MEDEAS RES is another festival highlight. Like De Keersmaeker and Mriziga, director Chris Haring draws from a distant poetic past: the Greek mythological figure Medea, who infamously murdered her two sons to take vengeance on her husband. In this corporeal installation we hear something like dramaturgical discussions, plain contemporary reflections on Medea’s ancient story that has the audience chuckling. Meanwhile the stage is jam-packed with objects: lights, projectors, cameras, masks, steel springs, flesh-coloured latex sheets… which are constantly rearranged by two dancers. Overlapping projections create the horrific effect of a gaping hole in one dancer’s body, as if below his ribcage all organs have made way for a black void. These resourceful theatre tricks aren’t kept secret, they are set up step by step in front of the audience with surgical precision. A fleshly theatre ritual that feels like an anatomy lesson, a dissection of Medea herself.
Equally bare is Repertório N2 by Davi Pontes and Wallace Ferreira, two black Brazilian performers. The premise of their work is simple: two naked dancers, wearing only black sneakers and training socks, stay side by side and in perfect sync while they step through the room. The loud stomps and sharp squeaks of their rubber shoe soles are, again, amplified by mumok’s towering walls. Pontes and Ferreira’s walking pattern is broken only when they freeze in sculptural poses or take a moment to glance at each other or the audience. Their transitory body sculptures vary from stylised, playful, to sexual, one time even squeezed between two women in the audience. The nudity, the stillness, the gazing… all of these elements are so pertinent to the exhibition hall. They are adopted and instrumentalised by the performers in their strategy of resistance, their claim and defence of their place in history.
There’s something peculiar about watching dancers perform naked, because everyone acts so apathetic and intellectual about it, perhaps even a little too much, to cover up the shameful excitement and stimulation it often provokes. It’s hard to keep your cool in Clara Furey’s UNARMOURED, a piece for four dancers. The work builds up with subtle hip rolls, waving spines and arching backs, movements that summon a spiritual portal to an erotic dimension. The dancers’ reality expands into smoky cosmic vastness, with poisonous green and ultraviolet lights exposing their bodies, amidst the swelling of a pulsating techno beat. The soundscape is infectious and hypnotising. It organises the dance in rhythmic and structured steps and heel taps, like a group of line dancers invading Berghain. After the piece erupts into climax, only dancer Brian Mendez is left at the centre of the stage, now completely naked and soaked in sweat. After an hour-long of sexual charging, of ‘edging’, his body becomes all the more compelling, expressing the choreographer’s belief that beauty only appears after a long arduous process, not out of nowhere.
From UNARMOURED to the armoured body of Soa Ratsifandrihana in her solo g r o o v e. The French-Malagasy choreographer presents a movement collage of musical childhood memories, transformed and bundled into a slowly progressing energy, a groove, for the audience to witness in close proximity from four directions. In the first act, Ratsifandrihana powerfully vibrates through the dimly lit stage, breathing heavily, humming, licking and spitting. The shadow that falls over her curly hair hides her face completely. Her anonymous mysterious body is as sturdy as that of a rugby player. Her huge shoulders appear to be padded, when Ratsifandrihana strips herself of this shell and reveals a colourful top in the second act. The atmosphere warms up with the help of yellow lights and wood percussion. Her dance now takes the shape of structured walking patterns, salsa hips, stepping and popping in one assembled, eclectic form. Her passionate dancing radiates heat, as if we’re witnessing the mesmerising dance of a flame.
Although Geumhyung Jeong’s centrally staged dance solo has similar blueprints, her Find, Select, Copy and Paste is like a ‘yin’ pendant to the heartwarming g r o o v e. Jeong resorts only to her naked body, not to lighting or sound. She lays down on mumok’s cold floor, raises her arms to the ceiling, and rocks from left to right like a pendulum. With each swing she shifts her orientation slightly, like a rotating pointer on a clock. For over an hour she manoeuvres in minimalistic, repetitive and mechanical variations. Jeong’s pale skin suggests that the ice cold floor has drained her of all body heat. To endure such torture is impossible if you can’t convince yourself that you’re an object, an engine. Jeong dehumanises herself to hardware without emotion. Her body is only speaking a language of machinery, through the bones that perpetually push through her skin.
Body mechanics get real functionality and effect in Alexander Vantournhout’s Foreshadow. On the grand stage of Volkstheater, eight acrobatic dancers support and hook into each other, push and pull to make each other tumble, twist and soar above the ground in breathtaking constellations. The group of eight forms a collective origami, an assembled intricate system that constantly changes. They fold themselves together to bloom later like a lotus, catapult like a jack-in-the-box, spin like a windmill or glide like a paper plane. The movement language is so inventive, smart and refreshing that there is an effortless sense of humour in the simplest of movements. Vantournhout’s long research into the grey zone between circus and dance has provided him so much knowledge on how humans (can) move, on the gravitational forces that work into it, paying off in each of his new works with exhilarating and unique dance vocabulary.
Lastly, before finishing this plunge into ImPulsTanz, I catch the festival revival of (M)imosa, a creation from 2011 by Trajal Harrell, Cecilia Bengolea, François Chaignaud and Marlene Monteiro Freitas. (M)imosa is a spontaneous, convention-breaking variety show with hilarious and confusing acts. It reminds me a lot of the little shows me and my cousins used to put on at family gatherings, including quick costume changes that would happen under the eyes of the spectators. There is as much going on off stage as on stage: the performers are chatting with audience members, checking their phones, or even brushing their teeth. Chaignaud does most of his costume changes in the audience, sometimes literally on people’s laps in the auditorium, where he had hidden designer bags full of clothes before the show. Their lawlessness spills over to the audience, whose boundaries crumble under the festive atmosphere; some start to walk around, initiate conversations with the performers or take selfies – showing us how restrictive, snobbish and unidirectional theatre-going can otherwise be. ●
Part 2 of the Springback coverage from ImPulsTanz will be published shortly
