HOLD&RESIST_a springrite

Gravity does not act the same everywhere. In outer space, we are weightless. In the performance experiments of Liquid Loft, set to the delicately swinging ambient noise of the meta-rock electronic group Radian, the body’s potential is explored in confrontation with the rule of gravity. Poses are stretched beyond their limits, exhaustion is pushed to the edge, and tensions are held that seem to contradict the laws of nature. Seen politically, this becomes a resistant stance – one that pushes back against oppressive conditions and authoritarian tendencies. To endure, to stand firm, to hold one’s position.

At the heart of the work lies a hope in the unlikely, yet still possible: HOLD&RESIST_a springrite is an initiative of donaufestival and marks the first collaboration between Liquid Loft and Radian. The piece brings together astonishing, almost impossible slow-motion tipping figures with closely attuned, finely textured sound worlds. These are shaped by dynamic stop-and-go moments, microtonal shifts, and a free yet focused play between composition and improvisation.

Thomas Edlinger

HOLD&RESIST_a springrite

If a society is built to optimize everything, pushing efficiency nonstop and squeezing out maximum profit, then anything that doesn’t fit that goal comes under pressure. Whatever slows things down or breaks the pattern gets labeled as an error, a flaw, noise, aging, unpredictability, or lack of performance. It gets cut, removed, replaced. But those exact leftovers, the discarded traces, are what Liquid Loft and Radian pick up and work with. They read them against the grain. Where others see waste, they stage resistance. They flip the script, turning supposed flaws into charged, crafted signals of protest.

Radian draw from a deep sound archive packed with fragments most people would filter out: interference, background noise, glitches, even the silence of a system breaking down. Sounds that don’t “belong” in clean compositions suddenly take center stage. Liquid Loft, this time, push the body to its limits. Their choreography focuses on endurance and on refusing it. A body that won’t comply. Muscles start to tremble, shapes collapse, poses can’t be held. Gravity steps in, and it doesn’t care who you are. Gender, age, origin, it treats every body the same. At that breaking point, something universal appears: a physical language beyond words. A social body stripped of identity markers. Fatigue takes over direction and rewrites the choreography in real time. The body decides what it can do and what it won’t. Paradoxically, it is right there at the edge of control that a shared idea of the body emerges, one that pushes back against a culture obsessed with optimization.

In dialogue with these physical limits, Radian amplify sounds we are trained to ignore. Detached from their sources, these noises break free from fixed meaning. If their pieces tell a story, it is the story of abstraction, the act of pulling sound out of its usual function and letting it exist on its own terms. What used to be dismissed as malfunction or interference becomes part of a new sonic field where boundaries dissolve and new relations form.

Together, Liquid Loft and Radian create crossings between dance and music, between control and collapse, between signal and noise. They stretch the limits of their genres while pushing back against the fantasy of perfect efficiency. What they show is a world that learns from mistakes instead of erasing them, a world where failure is not weakness but raw material.

Andreas Spiegl

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