Premiere at IMPULSTANZ Vienna International Dance Festival 2024

Inside the ancient revenge tale of the godforsaken, world-weary Medea lies an abyss-facing narrative of female determination and self-empowerment. Bearing all consequences, Medea resists, takes on the fight against the heteronomy enforced by her husband, does not allow others to pass her over. She comes, as the evening’s title suggests, right down to the point. Liquid Loft takes on this character in an associative manner and by strikingly double-casting her role: the open character study born out of the interaction between Hannah Timbrell and Dong Uk Kim builds on the interplay of fusion and distance, of twin-like bonding and self-dissolution. The cracks spreading through this double-headed and two-gendered creature’s wall of symbiosis seal her fate. Fragments of a chronology
of downfall.

The cinematic Medea excursion by director and theoretician Pier Paolo Pasolini from 1969 – starring opera superstar Maria Callas – set this project intellectually and confrontationally into motion: in Medea, rationalism and animism, technology and tribalism face each other, archaic (sound) cultures are confronted with the exterminating forces of materialism.
The power of magic and the sovereignty of imagination surround and define the figure of Medea. In that sense, enchantment and phantasmagoria also determine the form of the evening. IN MEDEAS RES trusts in the polyvalence of ambiguous and merging images – that’s what they are: ambiguous picture puzzles, scenes and beliefs with multiple readings, optical ploys – as well as in a series of pivotal props: the objects made by artist Patrizia Ruthensteiner complicate the semantic offers considerably, acting as sculptures, sound bodies and physical extensions; they are scenography and videography, are used as textures, instruments and fabrics. These objects, too, are thought of in an animistic fashion, seem literally “souled”, lend IN MEDEAS RES an installative and, at the same time, volatile flair: Medea in situ. It is a mental space which the choreographed double figure inhabits, like the rugged scene of their own psyche. This is where Medea gets lost and radicalised, where she suffers her rage, her loneliness.

This work’s living images are based on a choreography of metamorphosis. The continuous transformations, produced by the fluidity of bodies and things, possess a vaguely futuristic energy, seemingly promoting a tale of current and forthcoming power dynamics, movements of migration and spirituality.

“How do you live amongst the ruins of your body?”, asks the Medea character in Heiner Müller’s Verkommenes Ufer Medeamaterial Landschaft mit Argonauten (1982); a valid question, the physique of people being, like their psyches, brittle – and with that: (trans)mutable.
Stefan Grissemann

Dance, Choreography: Hannah Timbrell, Dong Uk Kim
Artistic Director, Choreography: Chris Haring
Choreographic Assistance: Dante Murillo, Anna Maria Nowak, Luke Baio
Composition, soundconcept: Andreas Berger
Lightdesign, scenography: Thomas Jelinek
Soundobjects, artistic equipment: Patrizia Ruthensteiner
Voice, text recordings: Dante Murillo, Anna Maria Nowak, Luke Baio
Dramaturgy-Assistent: Judith Thaler
Theory, text: Stefan Grissemann
Stage Management: Roman Harrer
Company Management: Cornelia Lehner
Costume: Patrizia Ruthensteiner, Stefan Röhrle
Set Design: Franziska Zauner
Videodokumentation: Michael Loizenbauer, Judith Thaler
Distribution: APROPIC – Line Rousseau, Marion Gauvent