SOIRÉE DANSANTE at Salon Gudrun

Liquid Loft & PHACE
cordially invite you to a
SOIRÉE DANSANTE

December 16 / 17 / 18, 2024
Durational performance 6 PM – 9 PM
at Salon Gudrun

limited capacity, registration requested!
Due to the limited capacity, we kindly ask you to let us know the date and time of your visit at info@liquidloft.at

Liquid Loft and PHACE have the honor of inviting you to a soirée dansante at Salon Gudrun, located at the corner of Laxenburgerstraße and Gudrunstraße in Vienna. Inspired by the former grand establishments of the suburbs, this immersive ball evening invites the audience to explore freely, unfolding across multiple rooms and spanning three hours. Here, the ballroom becomes a container where the decadence and upheavals of the 19th and 20th centuries flash like a double exposure. The deconstructed Viennese waltz is no longer a couple’s dance, yet it unmistakably retains the utopian energy of its sweeping motions and rotations. A valse capricieuse emerges – a playful act that serves as the prelude to a larger, serialized project.
This event also acts as a preliminary study for performances that Liquid Loft, once again collaborating with PHACE, will realize as part of the Johann Strauss 2025 festival year.

Location: Salon Gudrun
Laxenburgerstraße 28-30/ Corner Gudrunstraße, 1100 Vienna
14A oder U1 Keplerplatz

 

When a troupe inclined towards phantasmagoria, like Liquid Loft, teams up with the contemporary music ensemble PHACE to rethink the nearly two-and-a-half-century-old cultural form of the waltz, one should not expect ordinary sentimentality, convenient retro gestures, or lively three-four-time antics. Instead, the soirée dansante now taking place at Salon Gudrun presents itself as an installation-based work of art and sound, prioritizing reflective deceleration over sensory acceleration.

The term “social dance,” traditionally associated with the waltz, proves unexpectedly productive in this context, as the social – and therefore political – dimensions of ostensibly entertaining and leisurely techniques are given particular emphasis. The dark sequences of this soirée explore issues of authority and class, offering an associative analysis of Michel Foucault’s “microphysics of power,” that ominous interplay of everyday forces of tension and pressure acting upon bodies and subjects. The performance unfolds as a gallery of images reflecting desires and fears, followed by a ballroom of sensory deception. In the visual spaces of this evening, a series of perceptual experiments take place. The images shift, unhurriedly, not so much accompanied by their mysterious soundtracks as clinically dissected by them. The art forms intertwine, blending choreography with cinema, sculptural and painterly elements, and musical compositions in a carefully choreographed swirl of media.

The dancers repeatedly freeze, each one alone (and perhaps God against all), illuminated by solitary spotlights and often transformed by exquisitely banal projections into stand-alone tableaux – better described, perhaps, as unfree-standing body-images – where faces abruptly morph into mask-like portraits. Displacement serves as a foundation for this work, both emotionally and formally. The transition from one sphere to the next carries a ghostly quality, while the historical relay race – a sprint through the past two centuries, from the frivolity of waltzing to the devastation of mass destruction – ensures the perpetual mobilization of phantoms, preserved in black-and-white, coarse-grained images, and the endless loops of early cinema. In this way, the soirée dansante becomes an exercise in metamorphic necromancy, a work of applied transformative art. In the uncanny, we find ourselves at home: in that which is unhomely, which – as Freud reminds us – can be understood as a distillation of the familiar and the repressed, of the homely and the hidden.

Thus, this musical performance can also be read as an existential piece, narrating how the waltz – left, center, right – and by extension the dance itself, with its vigor and rotation, its whirls and compulsive repetitions, clears the slate: how everything is swept away, ruined, or, depending on perspective, how a liberating strike is made (and continues to be made), preparing the ground for something new. And yet again, the old forces of tension and pressure appear: the pull, the drift, the undertow that inexorably draws downward into the dark. The form this kind of subhistory takes must be delicate, inherently vulnerable. What would contemporary experiments in perception be without cracks in the surface? Unthinkable. Time is fractured, and so too is its art.