TURNING POINTS. PUSH AND PULL
Disorientation, destabilisation, heterogeneity – these descriptions of the precarious are no longer reserved for economic or social developments, but have equally found their way into current analyses of dance and performance. Our observations are concerned with the dissolution of historical categories, a radical simultaneousness of highly differing stylistic and geopolitical approaches and the diminishing possibilities of understanding artistic developments in terms of recognised categories such as media, identity or gender or attributions of modernism or post-modernism.
The re-emergence of the shimmering phenomenon of the contemporary is evidence of these upheavals: between vague diagnostics and promises of openness and flexibility, in reaction to deep transformations in the world order and then to a series of prominent reconstructions and re-enactments in performance arts, it points to a changing relationship to (art) history and a shared search for a being in the world.
In reference to Allan Kaprow’s performative installation of the same name, the projects invited in the framework of the curation of Push and Pull aim for a complementary movement between experiences of immediacy and their discursive turns, which is above all constitutive for the field of contemporary choreography and performance art: rooted in the chiasm of formalist and socio-political tendencies, they describe physical and discursive gestures of repositioning and reformulation and emphasise the turning points within a relational structure. More than being about the acts of fixing or the autopoietic definition, it is a case of movements of mutual sensing out, from which statements emerge, are negotiated and temporarily established.
The projects shown focus on a shared interest in collaborative practices and question the effects and strategies of crossovers into other fields of knowledge. In their attempt to give a temporary binding form to the resonances of an unstable ground in this multifaceted interlocking and blurring, the everyday and the present as much as questions of readability and of affect are negotiated, and – in these tipping points – impulses for a new understanding and communication process are formulated.
(Author: Sandra Noeth/Head of Dramaturgy TQW; Text printed in TQW Program OCT. 10)
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Push and Pull is a corporate, interconnecting performance series of Tanzquartier Wien and MUMOK in collaboration with Tate Modern London and curated by Barbara Clausen, Walter Heun, Achim Hochdörfer, Kathy Noble, Sandra Noeth and Catherine Wood.
