Squaring the Circle

In the crisp Vienna autumn of 2025, the Tanzquartier Wien hosted a quietly electrifying European premiere: Dean Moss’s figures on a field, originally performed in The Kitchen in New York in 2005. These performances, which took place in TQW Hall G from October 23–25, were much more than a historical homage. They were a meditation on representation and the shifting terrains of visibility.

Isabel Lewis, the artistic director of the Tanzquartier Wien (together with co-director Rio Rutzinger) speaks enthusiastically of the importance to her of presenting this work as a seminal piece of dance history now, in her debut season 2025-26. She saw the original production in New York, and 20 years later, has given the Viennese and European audience a chance to experience in a fresh light this link in the chain of the vital lineage of African-American dance history.
Dean Moss, whose interdisciplinary, conceptual practice was an important impetus in New York’s experimental dance scene of the 1990s and 2000s, presented Vienna with a piece that was radical for its time and is also urgently contemporary. It was originally choreographed in collaboration with the painter Laylah Ali and drew its inspiration from her Greenheads Series. These paintings, portraits of enigmatic, masked figures, exude a latent potential for violent action, despite being rendered with a comic book aesthetic.

The choreographer and visual artist Moss began the piece with a breaking of the fourth wall. The dancers, as they came one by one onto the stage, immediately wandered from the stage to chat with randomly selected members of the seated audience, asking small talk questions as one would at a cocktail party. Also, during the dance performance, when not interacting with each other physically or through glances and directed gazes, some of the dancers chatted with each other as if they were no longer in the middle of a dance performance, but in some other kind of setting of a social nature.

Moss, who also performed, selected dancers living in Vienna (Mzamo Nondlwana, Evandro Pedroni, Imani Rameses, Jaime Lee Rodney and Daliah Touré) to bring his choreography to life. Interwoven with the narrative strand of the “traditional” choreography was the tour through the dance performance, led by a tour guide, played to perfection by TQW staff member Christina Gillinger, who is not a trained dancer. The tour took place on the stage, while the dancers were performing. Gillinger animated her tour group to take photos and selfies. She encouraged them, all of whom expressed a confused body language marked by hesitant movements and gestures of reluctance, to cross the stage in order to see the performance from different angles, weaving in between the dancers who were carrying out the choreography.

A tour guide is a familiar fixture from a museum visit. Perhaps the inclusion of this element in the piece is a nod to the painter Laylah Ali, whose work is primarily encountered in a museum context. But a tour during a live performance? Neither the audience nor the tour group participants, who actually paid for the tour just as they would have in a museum, knew exactly what to make of the situation. The deliberateness of the choreographed movements contrasted with the spontaneous irregularity of the emotional predicament of the tour members. This was framed by the stubborn cheerfulness of Gillinger as the tour guide, who shepherded her basically unwilling group with determination across the stage and through the action.

This clash of conflicting signals and expectations created a semiotic whirlwind of meaning that was indecipherable yet visually delightful. The visible emotional distress of the tour group, the implacableness of the guide, and the “artificial movement” of the predetermined choreography forced the audience to gauge for themselves just how much Schadenfreude they were prepared to allow themselves to experience. In this dance piece Moss complicates the gaze as a mechanism: who is watching, who is being watched, and what does it mean to be rendered as a “figure” in the field of representation?

If one were to read figures on a field as a visual poem, one would note Moss’s translation of Ali’s graphic, masked silhouettes into choreographic gestures and slightly cartoonish, slightly unflattering costumes. The dancers move not with flamboyance, but with a deliberate restraint, their bodies echoing the flat, graphically rendered menace and ambivalence of the Greenheads figures. There is a dark undercurrent in the work, a stillness that pulses with tension, as if each dancer carries a secret, or is ready to cross a threshold. Dean Moss asks us perhaps to read the physical body as text, to interpret the silhouettes not just as form, but as signifiers of power, vulnerability and otherness.

Ultimately, the restaging of figures on a field in Vienna is not simply a revival of a landmark work, but a renewed call to attention. The piece does not prescribe meaning; it entices us into a field of ambiguity. It is a poetic, political, and deeply emotional exploration of the ever-shifting field of human relations. In that space, we are invited to reflect on our own positions — as viewers, as bodies, and as historical beings.

New York–born Dr. Renée Gadsden is an art and cultural historian specializing in Gender Studies, working as a curator, art educator, and author for institutions including the Albertina, the Vienna Secession, the Belvedere, the Museum of Modern Art Ludwig Foundation Vienna, and the Jewish Museum Vienna. She studied art history at Brown University and the University of Vienna, as well as sculpture and cultural studies at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.
She serves on the art advisory board of the Ruth Baumgarte Foundation, is a juror for the Parallel Vienna/Bildrecht Young Artist Award, and is a correspondent for kunst:art. Gadsden has published numerous books and essays and taught for many years at Austrian universities; she is also a co-founder of the Institute for Language Arts at the University of Applied Arts. She lives in Vienna.