In Gootopia – The Treatment, Doris Uhlich’s performance first presented at Tanzquartier Wien in 2021 finds its logical continuation. This time, the choreographer, while still focusing on key motifs such as the exploration of links between people as well as between people and non-human agents, the shifting of bodily limits and the immersion in mucus, now adds the element of audience interaction. Attendants will have the opportunity to get in touch, physically, with various mucous substances. In addition to working with goo themselves, the performers will also act as guides leading visitors to stations across the performance space where they will receive treatments in a workshop-like atmosphere.

Being both material and actor, the mucus will perform on, in, and between bodies. Humans and goo will touch, connect, mingle, form alliances. As ever new connections form, bodily limits melt, opening associative spaces for new, slimy, utopian life forms. Doris Uhlich has been pondering how our bodies are in permanent contact and exchange with other bodies and life forms. Her Gootopia – The Treatment is an attempt to open up an ambivalent plane between horror and fascination, empathy and repulsion, allowing the audience to immerse themselves in the vitality of material processes.

Doris Uhlich is an Austrian choreographer and performer. In her productions, she often puts established formats and body images to the test. For example, she works with people with different backgrounds and physical bodies, demonstrates the potential of nudity beyond sexualisation and provocation, examines the relationship between humans and machines in manifold ways, and tackles the future of the human body in the age of surgical and genetic perfectionism. Doris Uhlich has received numerous awards and accolades. www.dorisuhlich.at