Doris Uhlich featuring Dorothea Zeyringer
and again

Doris Uhlich and Dorothea Zeyringer look back to the year 2007, when and premiered during the imagetanz festival at what was then called dietheater Künstlerhaus. The project featured nine elderly people and Doris Uhlich on stage. It focused on the fragility and sturdiness of the aged body, presenting an archeology of body (hi)stories. Based on rudimentary moments of movement like walking, standing, sitting and lying down, every person developed their own personal movement material.

2017, ten years later, some of the performers have died. There is, however, still a video recording of the performance, and Doris Uhlich likes to remember that work and the people involved. For The Inheritance at imagetanz, she creates, together with Dorothea Zeyringer, a ten-minute vacuum in which and is brought back to life.

Doris Uhlich studied “contemporary dance pedagogics” at the Vienna Konservatorium. She was one of the players of the group theatercombinat from 2002 to 2009, and has been devising her own projects since 2006. In the 2008 year book of Balletttanz, she was registered as a “remarkable young choreographer”, and the tanz magazine declared her “Female Dancer of the Year” in both 2011 and 2015. In 2013, she was awarded the “outstanding artist award” of the Culture and Arts department of the Austrian Federal Chancellor’s Office in the performing arts category. She has been touring and teaching in various countries of the world. Since autumn of 2015, she has been a lecturer at the Vienna Max Reinhardt Seminar. www.dorisuhlich.at

Dorothea Zeyringer studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and the Inter-University Centre for Dance Berlin. Since 2012, she has been working with artist Tiina Sööt at the interface between visual art, dance and theatre. The performances of Sööt/Zeyringer have been shown, among others, at imagetanz, Sõltumatu Tantsu Lava Tallinn, Kunstraum Niederösterreich and the Cologne Theatre. Their production lonely lonely, which premiered at the 2015 imagetanz festival, received awards from the Austrian Federal Chancellor’s Office and the Stockholm Fringe Festival. https://sootzeyringer.wordpress.com

Christine Gaigg featuring Simon Mayer
The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light

For The Inheritance, Christine Gaigg and Simon Mayer focus on the piece The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light that opened the 1998 imagetanz festival. Christine Gaigg – called “Vienna’s most aggressive independent dance newcomer” by Helmut Ploebst at the time – had designed a “concise, excitingly sinister male duet” (Falter) based on the sado-masochistic relationship sketched in Michael Kleeberg’s novella Barefoot. The piece was accentuated by a specially commissioned composition by Max Nagl and light designed by Philipp Harnoncourt.

Almost twenty years later, the now internationally acclaimed artist Christine Gaigg and the internationally emerging choreographer-dancer Simon Mayer use this work as a basis for their contribution to the imagetanz project The Inheritance to find out what a young choreographer’s contentual and formal take on the themes and motifs of the piece could be.

Christine Gaigg is a choreographer (2nd nature), director and writer. After completing her training at SNDO Amsterdam, she appeared at imagetanz for the first time in 1994. Starting in 2000, she devised structural choreographies in collaboration with composers such as Max Nagl, she explored a so-called loop grammar together with Bernhard Lang, and she opened the 2010 steirischer herbst festival with her piece Maschinenhalle#1. Her most recent works have been “stage essays” entitled DeSacre! Pussy Riot meets Vaclav Nijinsky (2013), Maybe the way you made love twenty years ago is the answer? (2014), untitled (look, look, come closer) (2015) and Clash (2016). www.2ndnature.at

The performer, dancer, choreographer and musician Simon Mayer studied at the Vienna State Opera’s ballet school and the Performing Arts, Research and Training Studios (PARTS) in Brussels. He was a member of the Vienna State Opera Ballet. As a dancer, choreographer and musician, he has appeared, among others, in the productions of Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker/ROSAS, Wim Vandekeybus and Zita Swoon. He has been touring very successfully, showing his own pieces in Austria and internationally, for several years. www.simonmayer.at

Philipp Gehmacher featuring Simon Mayer
the mumbling fish

In Philipp Gehmacher’s contribution to The Inheritance, he hands down a memory to choreographer, dancer and singer Simon Mayer. It’s a memory of his first choreography, the mumbling fish. Twenty years after, Philipp Gehmacher questions what it was that he himself received in 1997 – or simply just took? The joys and burdens of inheritance are tackled, as is the question whether Simon Mayer will be at all willing to accept the inheritance? Will he feel like taking care of it, or did he just come here to make Philipp Gehmacher’s “mid-career f/low” a little more appealing?

 Choreographer-dancer Philipp Gehmacher lives in Vienna and works here as well as internationally. His works explore movements, actions and language inherent to the body. Since 2011, in addition to his choreographic work, he has also dealt with exhibitions and video works, being part of the “Sculpture and Space” class of the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Philipp Gehmacher’s performances and sculptural works are widely represented at both theatre festivals and exhibition spaces. www.philippgehmacher.net

The performer, dancer, choreographer and musician Simon Mayer studied at the Vienna State Opera’s ballet school and the Performing Arts, Research and Training Studios (PARTS) in Brussels. He was a member of the Vienna State Opera Ballet. As a dancer, choreographer and musician, he has appeared, among others, in the productions of Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker/ROSAS, Wim Vandekeybus and Zita Swoon. He has been touring very successfully, showing his own pieces in Austria and internationally, for several years. www.simonmayer.at

Alix Eynaudi featuring Andrea Gunnlaugsdóttir
Long Long Revisited

For The Inheritance, choreographer-dancer Alix Eynaudi works with artist Andrea Gunnlaugsdóttir. Seven years after showing the piece Long Long Short Long Short, which Alix Eynaudi co-created with Agata Maszkiewicz for the 2010 imagetanz festival, she now subjects her performance to revision together with the younger artist Andrea Gunnlaugsdóttir. Long Long Revisited takes the kind of look one would throw at an ancestor, studying the previous performance as if it was an extra-terrestrial event. The two artists make fun of the project, they grow to love it, digesting it and spitting out a mutual ten-minute version they describe as “a jazzed and smokey piece, that smells like powder and rollers.”

Dancer-choreographer Alix Eynaudi lives and works in Vienna. She completed her training as a ballet dancer at the Opéra national de Paris and went on to work in various ballet companies before she took up studying contemporary dance at PARTS in Brussels and dancing for Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s company ROSAS. Since 2005, Alix Eynaudi has successfully toured the world with her own creations, while teaching, collaborating and performing with other artists, including Superamas, Kris Verdonck, Anne Juren, Boris Charmatz, Noé Soulier and Jennifer Lacey. www.alixeynaudi.com

Artist Andrea Gunnlaugsdóttir lives and works in Vienna. She studied choreography at the SEAD Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance and worked as a dancer in Doris Uhlich’s piece more than naked and as both a dancer for and artistic assistant to Michikazu Matsune. In 2015, she received a Start Stipend by the Austrian Federal Chancellor’s Office. She presented a showing of her current work Out of my mind at the 2016 imagetanz festival. http://cargocollective.com/andreagunnlaugsdottir

Daniel Aschwanden featuring Gerald Straub
Splinter Dances

Performer-choreographer Daniel Aschwanden and choreographer Gerald Strab use mutual dialogue to devise an associative re-enactment of the Splinter Dances, one of Aschwanden’s early solo performances from the year 1992. Their approach is to take the word “splinter” from the performance title and putting various interpretations of that term into an artistic dance context. There might be all kinds of different splinters: aphorisms as splinters of our mind, documentarian fragments and memory splinters of audience members and participants are supplemented by current interpretations and takes on the term.

On another level, added by the project The Inheritance, the original performance – including all related memories, anecdotes and events – serves as an archive for telling (and continuing) a new story based on the story already told.

Daniel Aschwanden is a Swiss performer and choreographer who lives and works in Vienna. His work is found wherever art meets social affairs: performative interventions in urban contexts and hybrid formats in the public spaces of Europe, Asia and Africa. www.art-urban.org

Gerald Straub is an artist, curator and applied cultural theorist with a focus on the performative production of space. He lives and works in Vienna. His work interconnects spatial settings and site-specific behaviours, applying performative interventions in order to explore in/formal knowledge productions. www.geraldstraub.wordpress.com

Superamas featuring Malika Fankha
PISSING EVERYWHERE IS NOT VERY CHANEL

Despite the increasing openness and diversity in our society, it seems that typical terms of gender roles and stereotypes continue to be hard to crack: It is still the middle-class white heterosexual man who rules the world, and masculine forms of grammar are the norm in most of our heads and languages. Even in LGBT circles, it is common to use clichés and constructed, well-established role models in order to make one’s place visible amidst the colourful field of non-conformist individualism.

Based on the 1999 Superamas show Superamas Local, performer Malika Fankha accepts the challenge to re-interpret a piece designed by a man and therefore informed by his thoughts and emotions. She does so by deliberately ignoring predefined clichés and ideas, transforming and distorting them and thus adds a new level to the piece’s identity radius. This way, the performance unfolds around an auto-fictitious character, whose driving force seems to be oscillating between personal experiences, metaphysical theories and tailor-made utopias of every-day life.

Malika Fankha studied acting in Zurich as well as contemporary dance at SEAD Salzburg and New York University. She now works as a choreographer, performer and DJ. Her works address the utopian features of popular and media culture using various genres such as rap, sound poetry and stand-up comedy. Her recurring theme of identity is manifested as a complex, variable construct made up of personal memories, self-made dystopias and utopias, as well as fragmented commentaries on contemporary lifestyle. www.malikafankha.com

The performance collective Superamas is at home in Austria, France and Belgium. Since 1999, Superamas have devised dance and theatre productions that have since toured Europe with great success. In addition to performing arts, Superamas also work at the interface with visual art and film and publish books on an irregular basis. Since 2016, Superamas have supported young Vienna-based artists with their “Huggy Bears” programme. www.superamas.com

Krõõt Juurak
Presentation

“To look back but with a forward-looking face. I have ten hours of performances and ten minutes to share them with you, like a man who tells you his life story in a bar, flipping through a binder with plastic sheets and photos where he shook hands with the president. I’m thinking it could be nice to also slip in some new work, but of course all of it will be new.” Krõõt Juurak

Presentation is a live portfolio containing past, present and future works by Krõõt Juurak. The performance was first shown at the 2014 imagetanz festival. For The Inheritance, Krõõt Juurak will bring Presentation back to the stage. In the 2017 extended edition, she considers the additional years of artistic experience she has gathered since. Sincere, humorous and closely connected with her own history as an artist, Krõõt Juurak’s solo performance constitutes a highly personal analysis of what it means to create something.

Krõõt Juurak is a choreographer and performer. Her work has been engaged in performative realities such as the disappearance of work time and leisure time, production and consumption, intention and chance. All these things lead directly to her works, which she then shows in the form of performances, presentations, installations, texts and workshops. Krõõt Juurak studied choreography at the ArtEz in Arnheim and visual art at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam. She has been devising her own works since 2002. Most recently, she was a guest at brut together with Alex Bailey, showing performances for art-loving dogs and cats. www.kr66t.wordpress.com

Anne Juren featuring Sara Lanner
Question A?

In 2003, performer-dancer Anne Juren presented her solo performance A? at the imagetanz festival. For The Inheritance, she will revive her first dance piece and link it to her current work as a choreographer. To do so, Juren enters into a direct dialogue with dancer-choreographer Sara Lanner. Together, the two of them go looking for differences and similarities between the past works of 14 years ago and those of the present.

“The A question, coming up as soon as one sees dance is very simple: What do you see? It might not be that simple to answer, the question being verbal and dance not. Dance nevertheless certainly is a language, an expression, articulating itself through differentiation and interpretation, developing a net of convention that makes it recognizable, intelligible. Anne Juren proposes a dance performance as the presentation of a body articulated via numerous degrees of interpretation. The reduction of movement makes visible subtle differences which might often be overlooked, as a seed to finer reading of movement of complexity. A? reduces dance to a body performing movements in front of an audience and then re-opens it to the sum of ways to do so.” A?, 2003

Choreographer-dancer Anne Juren was born in Grenoble and now lives and works in Vienna. In 2003, she established the association Wiener Tanz- und Kunstbewegung (Vienna Dance and Art Movement) together with visual artist Roland Rauschmeier. Her works have been presented all over the world several times. They usually attempt to extend the concept of choreography by bringing her own body and other people’s bodies into different physical, mental and kinaesthetic states, thereby both shifiting and questioning the limits between what is public and what is private. Since 2013, Anne Juren has been a Feldenkrais^® teacher. She is currently a member of the selection committee for the choreography master at the University of Dance and Circus (DOCH, Stockholm) while taking her doctoral degree at the Stockholm Art University (UNIARTS). www.wtkb.org

Sara Lanner is a freelance choreographer and dancer/performer working in the fields of dance and visual art. She studied contemporary dance and dance pedagogics (IDA Linz). She is currently taking studies of performative art at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Her work as a dancer and performer includes collaborations with Michikazu Matsune, LUX FLUX & Saira Blanche Theater and Anne Juren. Lanner’s current solo performance A Living Example was devised in the course of residencies at the Vienna Dance Festival and at Tanzquartier Wien in 2016 (in co-operation with Huggy Bears/Superamas) and in 2015 during her Wild Card/LLB Residency at Uferstudios Berlin as part of Tanztage Berlin. She showed some extracts from that piece during the 2015 imagetanz festival at brut Wien. A Living Example premiered in December 2016 at WUK Performing Arts in Vienna. www.saralanner.com