Doris Uhlich – More than naked – a stage work for 20 dancers

With the support of danceWEB / the LLB project, the Austrian choreograpger Doris Uhlich, artistic mentor of the danceWEB Scholarship Programme 2017, is reworking her piece "more than naked" to a stage work with twenty young dancers.

more than naked

Why do people take their clothes off on stage? What does one naked body have to say?
What do 20 naked bodies have to say?
(Stil) to say?

To say again? More to say?

In "more than naked", twenty naked dancers make their flesh wiggle, wobble, and crack. Their bodies slap against each other, sweating and snapping to dance floor hits and lavish sounds. Twenty people on stage are more than a group – they are a society. And this society sets itself in motion. As the movement unfolds, Doris Uhlich stands on stage, DJing to the whole event the motto being “Let’s party our body!” more than naked manages to bring to the stage naked- ness free of ideology and provocation.

Doris Uhlich was already occupied with making “her flesh” swing in her previous piece more than enough. In the process, she developed a fat-dance technique. more than naked is a con- sistent continuation of this concern with body discourses, and it blasts away conventional ideas of body, dance, and nakedness with tremendous subversiveness.

We embed the world in our thought and in our bodies, in our flesh. When you make your flesh move, you’re also making those embedded things move, because you’re moving the here and now. (Doris Uhlich)

"more than naked" premiered at ImPulsTanz in 2013. By returning ten years later with her successful breakthrough stage work more than naked through inviting around twenty emerging dancers and artists from all over the world, this classic work will be revisited, further explo- red, developed and shared with a new and upcoming generation of emerging artists. This six-month long period in form of a research residency made it possible that the participants learn about the classic’s concepts and movement materials and to gain new perspectives on the topics by a lively exchange with Doris Uhlich driven by her broad experience in the field.