untitled (look, look, come closer)

Christine Gaigg / 2nd nature & netzzeit / Klaus Schedl

The war is far away, somewhere in Afghanistan, in Syria – and yet it’s very close, on our laptops, our smartphones, on Spiegel Online or Facebook. Facts and propaganda are mixed up beyond recognition. War has always been partly a war of information, however, new media open up entirely new possibilities of self-representation and manipulation.
And so “IS‘s” propaganda videos are also more than simply terror caught on camera: they are filmed for the Western market, to recruit some people and provoke others. Their dramaturgy of horror is a refined one, a showing and not-showing at the same time, a demonstration of triumph and contempt with a considered aesthetic in which horror is skillful staged. It plays on our fear of death and simultaneous curiosity which makes us look away just a moment too late.
Together with composer Klaus Schedl, Austrian choreographer Christine Gaigg mounts an impressively focused and unflustered investigation into the viral video material distributed worldwide using the analog tools of performance, musical composition and text: a stage essay which expands our view of terror, violence and counter-violence while also leading into emptiness.
In common with many of Gaigg’s works, ‘untitled (look, look, come closer)’ is both conceptually and politically direct: on five tables surrounded by the audience, five performers calmly and precisely lay out pictures which they then dissolve: hints – helicopters, people, weapons, landscapes, perhaps – which become interpretations in our heads, while Klaus Schedl’s sound cloud growls, booms and rattles. Scenes arise and vanish and the more we focus, the more we lose focus. And like war, the pictures are always much too close and much too far away at the same time.

The show on 25 June is followed by an Artist Talk

Bus Shuttle service available between the Festival Center and the venue. Departure: 18:45 h. Return trip after the show.

ON

Duration 55’

Tickets can be purchased here

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