The year 1989 marked major political changes, the legendary David Hasselhoff concert in Berlin and the invention of the world wide web. But did you know it was also the year imagetanz was established? For its 30th anniversary, the festival presents a colourful three-week programme presenting new takes on choreography and performance. World premieres featuring local artists, international guest performances, studio visits, talks and parties will make up an exciting festival programme. This year’s festival centre with the main venues will be located at Atelier Augarten in Vienna’s 2nd district. Additional venues include Dschungel Wien and studio brut.

Following its motto, the festival will be “dancing 30 years ahead”, directing its eyes forward and focussing on innovative approaches in the realm of choreography and performance. The imagetanz artists search for alternative strategies of self-empowerment, reflect everyday racism, scrutinise social conventions and shed a light on them from queer-feminist perspectives. While themes are widely diversified, all works are connected by their effort to plumb present areas of social conflict and to look ahead.

The anniversary edition of imagetanz will open on March 8th, which is also International Women’s Day, by presenting the Austrian premiere of OH MY by queer-feminist performance collective Henrike Iglesias. Searching for alternative, queer and feminist visualisations of their own sexual desires, the members of Henrike Iglesias experiment with pornography as a strategy of self-empowerment and invite the audience to their very own porn set. Everybody is allowed to come. But nobody is forced to come.

This year’s programme also involves six world premieres created by local artists. In Volume, Jasmin Hoffer, Sara Lanner and Liv Schellander will focus on our organ of speech and reception, the mouth. In her figure-skating-inspired solo performance GLOWING current moods, Sophie Hörmann will skate on very thin ice between self-staging and meeting expectations, while Zoë Schreckenberg’ performance After Getting Up and Before Lying Down will centre around moments of transition. Alex Franz Zehetbauer will quite literally immerse himself in the audio-visual realm of whale intelligence in wet dreaming at 52Hz, while Robyn/Hugo Le Brigand’s sans culottes will pick up the heritage of the French Revolution as well as the energy of Breton folk dance to create a solo for two butt cheeks and one anus. Cat Jimenez and Maiko Sakurai Karner will ask: WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE? as they move back and forth between visual art and dance and tackle inter-cultural misinterpretations.

Another international highlight will be the Austrian premiere of Elena Pirinen’s Brume de Mer. The Finnish choreographer’s latest piece is an exhilarating stage sonata, in which round dances meet lyrical song and an intense organ composition.

The brut specials will provide space for discussions, an exchange of views and inspiring encounters. As part of our Handle with Care format, Inge Gappmaier and Asher O’Gorman will invite audiences to studio visits to present where they are in their processes of devising new works, not unlike Malika Fankha, who will show parts of her new performance Oxy Moron. A salon night and various artist talks will provide opportunities to meet in an informal atmosphere, and visitors may not just watch dancing but do it themselves as part of our imagetanz parties.

Welcome to imagetanz 2019 – dancing 30 years ahead!