TQW relaunch and new artistic director

Artists: Franko B, Tamara Cubas, David & Jakob/Matches Music, Julius Deutschbauer, Philipp Gehmacher & Marino Formenti, Alexander Gottfarb, Margareth Kaserer & Simon Steinhauser, Ankathie Koi, ON FLEEK, Anne Lise Le Gac & Élie Ortis, Andrea Maurer, Alexandra Pirici, Mark Tompkins, Therese Terror, Doris Uhlich

Tanzquartier Wien (TQW) is back, celebrating the relaunch under the artistic direction of Bettina Kogler with a three-day festival from January 25 to 27, 2018. “The re-opening introduces important cornerstones of TQW’s future program: the diversity of bodies, the relationship between choreography, visual art and performance, an appreciation of local artistic output, and the showing of non-European productions—these are the key issues that will determine the program in the coming years,” says artistic director Bettina Kogler.

Three days packed to the brim with international as well as local highlights. This is how TQW’s re-opening program presents itself. Doris Uhlich’s latest ensemble piece for nine physically disabled performers will start the festival off. The Viennese choreographer demonstrates in Every Body Electric what inclusion on an equal footing looks like, taking a strong stand for diversity and against exclusion in the process. Alexandra Pirici, one of her generation’s central protagonists of performance art, re-enacts historical events in which the boundaries between politics and pop culture become blurred in an ongoing performative action at Kunsthalle Wien. In the scope of his mammoth project Negotiations, choreographer Alexander Gottfarb, born in Sweden and living in Vienna, will be dancing together with his performers for 365 days in the dance subsidiary, a retail outlet in Vienna. On hundreds of wooden planks, shooting star Tamara Cubas from Uruguay lets five dancers try out a new way of living together in an intense performance. Young French artists Anne Lise Le Gac and Élie Ortis enchant with an interpretation of trash dance videos. And, in a joint performative concert with pianist Marino Formenti, Viennese choreographer Philipp Gehmacher might turn just about everything upside down which one would expect from that genre. But there is plenty of time for exuberant celebrating and dancing as well, to DJ sets on all three evenings. And the finale is in the able hands of Ankathie Koi, serving up top-notch feminist pop.

Program February
“TQW’s program will be devised more markedly along thematic threads in the future. Exciting works by local and international artists in the broad field of choreography will thus come together under an umbrella term. The first thematic cluster in February makes grotesque physicalities the subject of discussion,” outlines TQW programmer Christa Spatt.

Marcela Levi and Lucía Russo from Brazil present an ecstatic dance solo on this topic to the rhythms of technobrega, a specifically Brazilian type of club music. Florentina Holzinger’s new group piece Apollon also examines the limits of the body—an intense tour de force that takes a strong stand against the prevailing cult of the body, incorporating elements of ballet, a circus freak show and 1960s performance art coupled with a healthy dose of humour and radicalness. Slovenian choreographer Janez Janša focuses on the act of breathing together as a metaphor for living together as a society.

Janez Janša is also one of TQW’s three new Theory curators besides artist and film-maker Katrina Daschner and curator, author and radio broadcaster Thomas Edlinger. They will be jointly responsible for the theory and lecture program at TQW in the future. This new model expands the centre’s perspective. In addition to a choreographic-analytical approach, a pop-culture outlook critical of society and a queer/feminist point of view are increasingly taken into account as well. The first two lectures by Karin Harasser and Adam Harper on February 2 address the month’s topic of grotesque physicalities.

For press inquiries please contact:
Franz Jud
T +43 1 5813591-65
presse@tqw.at