history
From their earliest works – Fremdkörper (2003) and Diese Körper, diese Spielverderber (2004) – onward, Liquid Loft breaks the notion that the presence of the body within performance can in any way be more immediate than a verbal utterance or media image. Liquid Loft is skeptical of the idea of naturalness onstage and instead examines the cultural subtexts and choreographic means that are used to create this impression.
Inspired by science fiction and cyborg theory, Liquid Loft’s early works reflect the experience of our changing perception and bodies, which is brought about by visual media and the everyday use of technology. The choreography shifts perspectives, isolates gestural and linguistic patterns from their everyday contexts and tries to integrate the outside view of the body into its movement vocabulary. A central aspect of the work is the use of acoustic dislocation.
These acoustic environments create new ways of thinking about dance movement and the spaces in which it happens. They shift and change the individual sonic field of the performers, separating the voice from the body, only to return it again but in a modified form. Thus, the dancers are given new, surprising possibilities to recombine their original material.
With this method of deconstruction and reconstruction, which applies to both the movement vocabulary as well as the perspectives of bodily perception, Liquid Loft continued to explore new fields of choreographic action. My Private Bodyshop and Kind of Heroes (2005) reflect the changing use of language in the context of cultural globalization. Running Sushi (2006) brings the moment of physical presence, which is unavoidable in performance, into collision with the altered pictorial conventions of Japanese manga aesthetics. The three-part Posing Project - The Art of Wow, The Art of Seduction, The Art of Garfunkel (2007-2008) investigates an arsenal of gestures, images and deceptions and their social conditions in a circulation of desire.
Wintersonne (2008), Austria’s contribution to the World Exhibition in Zaragoza, Spain, ironically pokes fun at stereotypes of national self-representation in a global context. Lovely Liquid Lounge and Das China Projekt, a collaboration with the Jin Xing Dance Theatre, analyzes the social attribution of gender within the medium of dance, and examines how exoticism is used to manufacture desire within European culture. A fascination with the exceptional as well as physical “strangeness/otherness" was also a starting point of interest for the collaboration with the dancers of Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo (Sacre: The Rite Thing, 2010). With Talking Head (2010) Liquid Loft worked again with its own dancers, trying to conceive language as sculpture and dance.
Starting in 2011 Liquid Loft collaborated with French visual artist Michel Blazy to create the Perfect Garden Series, which dealt with themes such as artificial paradises, baroque decadence and transience. The performance piece WELLNESS (2011) was developed specifically for the Palmenhaus, an extraordinary location in Vienna’s Burggarten. It was followed by Mush:Room (2012), an installative performance, centered around a stage set consisting of a cube of iridescent viscous threads (Blazy). Deep Dish (2013) formed the third part of the series: its installative arrangement conjures a sumptuous dinner of organic materials, which transforms into a journey towards visual parallel worlds.
The integration of the camera as an element of the choreography was further refined and intensified in the Imploding Portraits Inevitable- Series (2014-2016). Inspired by the earlier films of Andy Warhol and the New York Factory, Liquid Loft created Shiny Shiny…, False Colored Eyes (in co-operation with Burgtheater Vienna and ImPulsTanz Vienna International Dance Festival) and Candy’s Camouflage.
With the use of the voice being a central theme for Liquid Loft, Foreign Tongues (2017/2018) follows yet again a new approach to language. From over 100 voice recordings from different geographical regions of Europe, a “Babylonian Library” was created. Slangs, dialects and regional languages spoken by native speakers were used as a source for various productions such as the stage piece Foreign Tongues (Toulouse), the site-specific creations of Foreign Tongues (Street Cluster), a co-production with the IN SITU Network and La Strada Graz, Church of Ignorance, a creation originally for donaufestival Krems, and the stage-on-stage version Babylon (Slang), presented at ImPulsTanz Vienna International Dance Festival 2018.
For their next production, Models of Reality (2019), Liquid Loft used the wide-ranging sound material and experience in urban space from Foreign Tongues to work with architectural forms in (stage) interiors. Following the Bauhaus School's guiding principle "form follows function," Models of Reality gives choreographic form to the "functions" of space, movement, and sound.
Stand-Alones is a choreographic and musical composition of simultaneously performed solos that are synchronized with each other at specific moments and merge into a polyphony. Each individual dance interpretation is based on a distinct music, speech or sound composition. The concept was originally developed for the Leopold Museum Vienna and subsequently adapted for other museum spaces, followed by versions in public space. The Video Paintings are a cinematic realization of Stand-Alones that can be shown either as a cinematographic space installation or as an interactive online installation.
Blue Moon, You Saw... (2020) is inspired by the otherworldly atmosphere of Alain Resnais' classic film Last Year at Marienbad and Elvis Presley's interpretation of the song Blue Moon. For the company's 15th anniversary, Liquid Loft returned to a group piece that continues to express the dancers' autonomy from Stand-Alones.
Stranger Than Paradise is a hybrid, subtly futuristic chamber play for eight people and an investigative camera. In cooperation with Tanzquartier Wien, a film was realized in a stage setting and streamed live in 2021; a two-part evening of film and live performance took place at the ImPulsTanz Vienna International Dance Festival in the same year. Stranger Than Paradise was shown at dance and film festivals worldwide.
In the latest production Modern Chimeras, the motif of the chimera, which originates from antiquity, is associated with the present. Premiered in 2022 at the Odeon Theater as part of the ImPulsTanz Vienna International Dance Festival, the piece is a utopia that heralds the equality of beings, the avoidance of hierarchies, the end of those crutches we call coherence and order.
collaborations
Liquid Loft’s affinity for contemporary positions in visual arts has led to an expansion of their productions towards film (so far Liquid Loft has created 5 films based on their stage pieces together with experimental filmmaker Mara Mattuschka) and installation (collaborations with visual artists Aldo Giannotti, Günter Brus, Erwin Wurm and Michel Blazy, a.o.). This extension of choreographic methods towards media and creations that exist outside the conventional stage set permits dance to continually rediscover itself and be viewed from another "foreign" angle. With the Living Room Products, Liquid Loft has created a format which links choreography with other art forms and different artistic practices. The Living Room Products were created to allow experimentation between genres (music, film, visual arts) with the intention of initiating an exchange between artists in an informal studio atmosphere.
In the field of contemporary music, the collaboration with the musicians of Phace Ensemble for contemporary Music, composer Arturo Fuentes and visual artist Günter Brus (Grace Note, 2012), is yet another example of Liquid Loft’s interdisciplinary and collaborative approach. The various international ensembles with whom Liquid Loft have collaborated include: Dialogue Dance Russia (Groza, 2012), Staatstheater Kassel (Lego Love, 2013), Contemporary Ballet Moscow (Frozen Laugh, 2014), Balletto di Roma (Giselle, 2016), Balé da Cidade de Sao Paolo (Deranged, 2018) and TANZ LINZ (Schwanensee, 2022).
In 2022, Liquid Loft initiated the new format Living Positions together with the Odeon Theater. It brings back to the stage internationally successful, cross-genre and experimental productions created in Vienna, which were previously only shown there on a few days.
