Residency Karin Pauer at Workshop Foundation

In the frame of the Creative Crossroad activity, Karin Pauer was selected by danceWEB to receive a 2 years structural support by the LLB network to work amongst others on her latest production "Planet Body // Perpetuum Mobile".

This support includes a co-production support by danceWEB, residencies at MDT Stockholm and Workshop Foundation Budapest as well as the possibility to lead or participate in a workshop at STUK Leuven.

Karin Pauer is a vienna based performer and choreographer.
The exploration of relations, in-betweens, empathy and togetherness informs all of her works. She negotiates these notions combining embodied choreographic practices with language, visual arts and live music.
Since 2018 she is developing her performance series project ‚dances of the anthropocene‘ in which she works with a phenomenology that understands our bodies fundamentally part of the natural world and not separate from or priviledged to it.
Through this series she seeks to challenge our anthropocentric world view and focuses on developing deeply embodied practices of empathy and care. (for each other, various life forms, our ecosystem and the Planet itself.)
Additionally she is currently developing collaborative projects with visual artist and drawer Aldo Giannotti in which they explore ways of sculpting movement and social behavior through choreographic and visual means; investigate alternatives for socio-political, socio-cultural or socio- architectural relations and initiate interactions between everyone present in the situation.
During the Creative Crossroads cycle, Karin will finalize her current Soloproject ‘PLANET BODY’, in which she embodies Planet Earth; develop her next group performance with the working title ‘we were never one’ as well as develop further a drawing and movement practice together with visual artist Aldo Giannotti for collective encounters in Museum spaces.

Residency at Workshop Foundation Budapest

23.08.2021 - 03.09.2021

"During my residency at Workshop Foundation/ Budapest, I started my first research phase for my umpcoming project WE WERE NEVER ONE, which will premiere in April 2022 at Brut / Vienna.

WE WERE NEVER ONE is part of the cycle ‚dances of the anthro- pocene‘ which challenges and investigates our anthropocentric world view and seeks to develop embodied practices of empa- thy and care.
WE WERE NEVER ONE is a transforming performance installation project and an exhibition spa- ce. Bodies of sculpture and live perfor- mance fuse, gearing towards extended beings and hybrid bodies. In this work, inanimate and animate entities search towards a multi- textural and sensual environment.

The starting point for WE WERE NEVER ONE is the concept that in biological terms, human beings cannot be considered individuals, but are multicellular organisms.
WE WERE NEVER ONE aims to shape, embody and visualize this realization.

Together with my collaborators - visual artist Maureen Kägi and performer and choreographer Anna Biczók, I explored the inter-relational aspects of bodies of sculpture and the performing body in collaborative symbiotic structures.

The aim for these two weeks was to find an overall structure for the work and to analyze methods and strategies used within my practice and ways of sharing them with collaborators.

The first week I spent working with Maureen Kägi, initiating a shared process of embodiment relating with textural/ sculptural materialization of ideas.
We rendered different shapes, materialities, textures, imagery and possiblities for the spatial ins- tallation that will be part of the work.

The second week I spent together with Anna Biczók, investigating the methods for embodiment and material creation for the project based on the loose structure, that was decided upon in week 1.

We worked on an alphabet of terms relating to the anthropocene, finding physicalities and embo- died qualities for each of them - further turning it into an embodied poem of the anthropocene.

WE WERE NEVER ONE
// an embodied poem of the anthropocene

alphabet:

AIR
BACTERIA BORDERS BESTIARIES CORAL REEFS CARE
CHAINS CONNECTEDNESS CRISIS
DENIAL
ENERGY
FLOODS
FIRE
FUNGI
FORESTS
FEAR
GLACIERS GHOSTS
GOLD
GARDENS HySTERIA INVISIBLE
JOY
JUNGLE
KINSHIP
LOCAL MONSTERS MADNESS NUCLEAR WASTE OIL
POWER POLLUTION
PINK
QUEER REBELLION RESILIENCE RUINS
ROCKS
SOIL
SADNESS TENDERNESS URGENCY VIOLENCE
VIRUS XENOPHOBIA
Y WHY
Z

POEM e.g.:

- MY BLOOD TURNS INTO AN OCEAN OF SADNESS EACH TIME - TREES ENTER THIS BUILDING FROM BENEATH
- FORESTS OF HYSTERIA
- OCEANS OF PLASTIC
- JUNGLE OF JOY
- EXTINCTION IS FOREVER

Further following topics were investigated through a method of ‚thinking with the body‘:

- how human behaviour and activities shaped/ sculpted, changed the world
- influence of human behavior on athmospheric, geological and biological processes
- highlighting webs of histories and bodies from which all life emerges
- noticing the world around us (living in time of planetary catastrophy)
- every ‚I‘ is also a ‚WE‘
- art as tender activism - by giving a platform and agency to other life forms - embody them to empathize (the extinct as well as the existing and transformed)
- we are more mocrobe than human
- creating a portrait of the NOW that considers all entities and life forms"

Performance presentation "Planet Body // Perpetuum Mobile" at Tanzquartier Wien

„This body is fragile.“ — Karin Pauer

How is it possible to challenge and shake the anthropocentric perspective by means of empathy and care? To conduct such an experiment, Karin Pauer has chosen to embody the Earth. Starting with her own body, she searches for analogies between mankind and the planet. The perpetual movement of the Planet is juxtaposed with the body’s limitations. The performing body turns into a hard-working, fearless, tireless body. Pauer counters the notion of destruction and exploitation with a contemporary ritual. A space for contemplative rebellion emerges, filled with sound from the album Agora by Austrian electronic pioneer Christian Fennesz.

PLANET BODY is part of the series dances of the Anthropocene.