KulturQuartier Seestadt, Am-Ostrom-Park 11, 1220 Vienna
5 minutes walk from end stop Underground U2 Seestadt
Premiere: December 9 / 20:00
further performances: December 10, 11, 12 / 20:00
December 12: Party & Line Dance Special!
Tickets: https://ntry.at/extinctchoreography

Extinct Choreography is a performance for four dancers, developed for a new performance space in Seestadt Aspern Wien. In the basement of a new building, a raw cement hall, which is located at the same level as the now freighted archeological excavations underneath the surface of the Seestadt, Extinct Choreography sketches contexts for bodily and spatial associations relating to understandings of the cave, upright walking, and lost gestures.
The choreographic material takes inspiration from plastic reconstructions of the early human from the field of contemporary archeology and draws particular attention to the evolution of the hand.

A group of intimates embarks on a search for primal bodily qualities that include the handling of stylized tools and instruments, walking on hands and feet, and the carrying of vessels and human beings. Moving in fragile balance and at a dizzying height the bodies become resonant in this precarious shelter. Extinct Choreography brings together the individually embodied and culturally formed movements of the dancers, and stages them to electronic music in a new performance space located at the city’s periphery.

Essay Extinct Choreography by Lisa Moravec

Vanishing point, body, depth distortion. Three dancers enter Giotto’s Corridor in the most recent project of Viennese choreographer Georg Blaschke and media artist Jan Machacek. They arrive at an elusive refuge, where spatial structures and bodies overlap, and the rules of perspective appear to dissolve again and again. Giotto’s Corridor is inspired by the ground-breaking oeuvre of Italian painter Giotto, who paved the way for spatial perspective in painting and remains a major influence on our art and perception to date.

Giotto di Bondone (c.1276–1337) revolutionised the art of his time by overcoming two-dimensional representation. He experimented with foreshortening landscapes and buildings and gave his human bodies plasticity; his novel way of depiction informed not only Renaissance painting, but also our western view of the world. Seeing as the mathematical axioms of projective geometry had not been developed during his age, Giotto worked with a “provisional perspective” that sometimes leads into a world of illogical perspectives.

How does distorted depth perception effect the body, body portrayal, and the dramaturgy of bodies? To answer this question, Georg Blaschke and Jan Machacek in Giotto’s Corridor create new kinds of design principles at the intersection of physical performance and video-based intervention. Their signature projection technique draws on the motif of “false” spatial perspectives in Giotto and manipulates the spatial co-ordinates and the usual depth perception, thereby allowing spectators to delve into a razzle-dazzle both visual and choreographic in nature.

Viennese choreographer Georg Blaschke and visual artist Christian Kosmas Mayer, Austrian Outstanding Artist 2020, invite you to a performative walk in the new urban development area Seestadt Aspern. Together with the audience, they will follow the traces of the famous Battle of Aspern-Essling, Napoleon’s first military defeat. The walk will be musically accompanied by sound artist Christian Schröder.

A dramaturgically staged path across the former battle site leads from the new center of the Seestadt across wasteland and relics of old airstrips, through a memorial grove and thicket across open fields, to finally end at the so-called Schüttkasten, formerly a granary and now home to a Napoleon memorial museum. Verwilderung (feral, overgrowth) invites us to leave behind the present, this staged architectural and natural landscape, and sets off in the direction of an overgrown and forgotten zone. The artists, who have collaborated for the first time in the context of mumok moves, a cooperation between ImPulsTanz and the mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, lead us out of the shelter of bright daylight and into the ghostly twilight of our memory gaps.

The event will be held in German.

Duration: Approx. 75 minutes

In a series of Aktionen performer Georg Blaschke exposes his body to the eye of photographer Laurent Ziegler. The body becomes the underlying ground for serial choreographic arrangements and superimpositions of organic substances, which provoke formal bodily extensions in the images perceived as inner and outer landscapes. This setting allows a sensual experience on the border of perception and results in an astonishing interplay between image, choreography and action. An intimate dance on the horizon of focus and haziness. The aim is not to display individual sceneries on the surface level but to see the unseen, to inquire what meets the eye underneath the obvious and familiar. Gras invites the audience to dwell upon the suggestive power of the pictures and to undergo a sensual experience brought to a standstill.

The photographs are published as a series of 12 C4 prints in 110 × 165 cm (mounted, limited edition 2013). Six metallic walls, on which the prints are leaning, form two double-sided triptychs that the viewer could access from both sides. The installation was shown at:
odaada Gallery Vienna, 2014
9th Burgenländische Tanztage, OHO Gallery, Offenes Haus Oberwart , 2014
ImPulsTanz – Vienna International Dance Festival #30, Odeon Theater Wien , 2013

Gras is a production M. A. P. Vienna 2013 and has been realised with the kind support of the Cultural Department of the City of Vienna, the Federal Ministry of Education, Arts and Culture, ImPulsTanz – Vienna International Dance Festival and Cyberlab.

“One of the greatest challenges in today’s culture, urgently necessary from a political point of view, is how to bring analytical skills to bear on the perceptual physiological lan­guage of the image, an event and not an object — constantly changing, living and growing.”
Bill Viola, Unseen Images, 1992

“[…] Blaschke und Machacek wollen ihr Publikum am Aufbau einer Komposition teilhaben lassen, die sich vom schattenhaften Doppelgänger bis hin zum komplexen Diskurs über das Verhältnis zwischen der digitalen Bildmaschine und dem lebendigen Körper in seiner Performance, in seinen Abbildern und deren Umdeutung sowie der Übersetzung des Analogen in die Geisterräume der technischen Projektion spannt. […]
(Helmut Ploebst, corpusweb.net)

Choreographer Georg Blaschke and video/multimedia artist Jan Machacek make the work of the outstanding British painter Francis Bacon (1909 – 1992) the focal point of their new collaborative work. The body builds the central motif of their approach.
Going beyond the reception of Bacon’s artworks in a museum setting, Bodies and Accidents uses the means of performance and video art to open up an innovative view of the paintings that he created as a mirror of human existence. Images of the body – characterised by deformation, exposure and a great sensual intensity.

Whether the distortions which I think sometimes bring the image over more violently are damage is a very questionable idea. I don’t think it is damage. One brings the sensation and the feeling of life over the only way one can.
(Francis Bacon, Interview with David Sylvester)

Ich zeichne nicht. Ich beginne mit Klecksen aller Art. Und warte auf den von mir so genannten „Unfall“: den Klecks, der das Bild auslöst. Der Klecks ist der Unfall. Hält man sich aber an den Unfall und glaubt ihn zu verstehen, dann bleibt man bei der Illustration, da der Klecks immer eine Ähnlichkeit mit etwas aufweist. Der Unfall ist nicht zu verstehen.
(Francis Bacon im Gespräch mit Marguerite Duras, 1984)

Bodies and Accidents has been created in close collaboration with the perfomers, the sound, light and costume design.

Bodies and Accidents: Trailer
Bodies and Accidents: Extract Over-Head

Reviews:
corpusweb.net
tanzschrift.at

In the first collaboration of the Viennese choreographer Georg Blaschke with the media artist Jan Machacek, video art and choreography morph into a performative dialogue.
The main composition principles are loops and repetitions of movement sequences used to scan, measure and alienate both the familiar body and the familiar space. The interweaving of physical action with video images plays with phenomena of recognition, recollection, and re-interpretation of physical presence. The eye of the video-artist engaged with the physical experience and the projection of recorded images, which in turn instigated the performer to question the continuity of one’s own body.
Both artists are interested in the specific moment when borders are reached within their own medium and the ways, in which these boundaries initiate a response from the other.

For the opening of the new location of brut @ Zieglergasse in the 7th district of Vienna Blaschke, Machacek and their artistic team have createtd a completely new version of that collaboration.

The Bosch Experience part II is the second part of Georg Blaschke’s choreographic involvement with the world-famous triptych painting The Last Judgement by Hieronymus Bosch, exhibited at the Paintings Gallery of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.
This second part implements a collaborative process between M.A.P. Vienna (artistic direction: Georg Blaschke)l awine torrèn (Salzburg/AT, artistic direction: Hubert Lepka) and the Paintings Gallery of the Academy of FIne Arts in Vienna.

body & machinery
Georg Blaschke takes us on a journey through the deployment of machines and relicts of machineries. This deployment ends with an expansion of the choreographic space of action. In body & machinery two bodies resonate with the heavy and dismembered materiality of these machine’s fragments and give a new interpretation to their functionality: what was originally created to cause wounds and pleasures to the body and the earth is now relieved from its initial utility. Here the machine is a possible tool for tearing up ground and flesh but can also be considered as a separable accumulation of grotesque details. As a consequence of this choreographic projection, a complex and enthralling “movement created” image, is brought face to face with the world’s image of Bosch’s painting.

timor et tremor
After the productions engel, hochwald and sägewerk, timor et tremor is the “fourth state of aggregation” from Hubert Lepka / lawine torrèn’s project about landscape. In this duo for a LED-Wall and a dancer, the artist engages with principles of polyphony and movement. His work focuses on the effects of multivoicedness on the aesthetics of contemporary dance and flows into the question: how can reaction, cancer, reversal and fugue be made useful for the aesthetics of horror?