[8:tension] Young Choreographer's Series 2014

The curatorial team of the [8:tension] – Young Choreographers’ Series in 2014 consisted of the LLB network representative Bojana Mladenovic, Robert “Rio” Rutzinger, Christa Spatt, Christine Standfest and Michael Stolhofer. They invited 14 productions to a two-week’s residency in Vienna during which the artists were offered studio time, slots in workshops and free performances of the ImPulsTanz festival. Further, the artists could present their recent production on two evenings to the audience of the ImPulsTanz festival. These productions were also nominated for the Prix Jardin d’Europe 2014.

The following artists were invited:

Rosalind Goldberg "MIT"
Geumhyung Jeong "Oil Pressure Vibrator"
Dinis Machado "Black Cats Can See In The Dark But Are Not Seen" (a LLB – Coproduction)
Dana Michel "Yellow Towel"
Jillian Peña "Polly Pocket"
Albert Quesada "Wagner & Ligeti" (a LLB-Coproduction)
Teresa Silva & Filipe Pereira "What Remains Of What Has Passed"
Zhang Mengqui "Self Portrait and Sex Education for Myself"
Rebecca Patek "inter(a)nal f/ear"
Michel O'Connor "Tertiary" (a LLB-Coproduction)
Georgia Vardarou "Phenomena"
Karol Tyminski "Beep"
Daniel Kok/diskodanny "Cheerleader of Europe"( a LLB-Coproduction)
Gaetan Rusquet "Meanwhile"

In their mission statement, the curatorial team explains: „[8:tension] 2014, that’s 14 productions by young choreographers from as many different countries. A broad field – not just geographically speaking. In fact, one starts to wonder what it means these days to be “from a country”, especially for dance and performance artists whose life and work take them here and there and around the world. But that’s just an aside. After all, in the age of Conchita Wurst and in the world of pop at least desire seems to circulate boundlessly. 

In this year’s edition of [8:tension] it circulates through Europe, Asia and North America. It enters and passes through entirely new dancing bodies and into ours, as in the performances by Georgia Vardarou, Albert Quesada, Jillian Peña and Michael O’Connor. In the form of powerful sound waves or poetic cascades of words it causes walls made of brick and screens made of banana crates to collapse. It enters the body, gets caught in the mind and breaks through bodies that seem to want to burst. It transforms into various personas, including by the wonderful Dana Michel from Canada and the charming Daniel Kok from Singapore, or becomes a dance from a new world, as in MIT. In divergent and exciting ways Geumhyung Jeong from South Korea, Rebecca Patek from the USA and Zhang Mengqi from China show what all these dangerous passions have to do with sex, power and politics. As with Beckett, the end is in the beginning when Teresa Silva and Filipe Pereira, in their precise and beautiful work, ask what remains of what has passed. Or does it circulate endlessly after all, the desire?“