Danses macabres are being played on this performative turntable, such as can be found on some old frescoes. “These grotesque dances conjure up comic characters making fun of death, as well as rather t...

In 2018, the Canadian musician, dancer and choreographer presented her fascinating solo When Even The, inspired by Leonard Cohen’s poem of the same name, at ImPulsTanz in mumok. An ‘architecture of plea...

The future and the past are of the same fabric. We carry what was – and there­fore what will be – in us, it has inscribed itself into our organs and must therefore be legible, must make possible the unth...

The original is considered the greatest ballet classic of the early 20th century: Le sacre du printemps. Names associated with this masterpiece include Sergei Diaghilev, Vaslav Nijinsky and Igor Stravinsky....

Davi Pontes and Wallace Ferreira are stand­ing naked in front of the audience and propose an alternative to the structural and political violence that seems to have be­come a persistent presence in th...

What is old? There is a new way of looking at the body, the old body, the aged body. Covid has brought it into the foreground, shows like Germany’s Next Topmodel into the spotlight. In her musical­-discursive for­...

After a danceWEB scholarship in 2019 Djibril Sall returns to ImPulsTanz with evening.haiku, a performance named after Sonia Sanchez’s collection Morning Haiku, inviting the audience to take time out for...

He is an established poetic great on the Viennese dance scene, and he has always remained true to his own artistic stand­ards, regardless of the fluctuating trends in contemporary choreography. Born in ...

This is the way to play and dance a commu­nity: six dancers, the Viennese music ensemble Studio Dan and the audience combine to form a virtuoso association of sound and movement – in the open air to t...

Oh, the beauty of romantic ballet! For instance La Sylphide, with its floating pointe dancers and the evil witch Madge. ‘Floating’ and ‘witch’ are keywords for Florentina Holzinger: very special sylphs ...

The work of artist and choreographer Geumhyung Jeong explores the relationship between the body and the objects surrounding it. In her performance Rehab Training, Jeong has developed a customized rehab...

Geumhyung Jeong's Spa & Beauty investigates the relationship of body-objects, taking inspiration from the industry of beauty and body care products. Brushes, sponges, soaps and all the objects that touch ...

7 ways are 7 interactions of the artist with objects – 7 peculiar duets. Common things, once they meet with the artist’s body, come to life, become a partner in the game of pulling and pushing, and caus...

A Classic! First shown at ImPulsTanz’ [8:tension] Series in 2014, this piece has nothing lost of its charm and intelligence. Geumhyung Jeong tells us of the pursuit of the subject of her desire in the fo...

Geumhyung Jeong creates choreographic assemblages with self­made robotic sculp­ tures. In a series of intimate encounters and sensual interaction with her homemade partners, she uses her body to communicate w...

Water burbles, patterns and images flit through this somnambulistic installation, in which a soloist dances – a shadow diva in a shiny sequin dress. Grace Ellen Barkey, who was born in Surabaya, Indonesia, an...

Who has succeeded in reformulating flamenco, adding elements of cross-dressing, bullfighting and the most diverse rituals from popular culture through to football to the mix, thereby carrying it over into...

“Artists must do all they can to make sure that their ‘poetics’ provide a powerful response to the all-devouring political suffocation we now find ourselves in”, Jan Lauwers writes about this piece, which i...

Lenio Kaklea was inspired to create this ‘duet with a pianist’ because music revolutionary John Cage composed pieces for the two African-American choreographers Syvilla Fort (1917–1975) and Pearl Primu...

The five men in this piece aren’t exactly shy. Carried by Serge Gainsbourg’s voice, they drift into a kind of trance and get themselves naked. Black, white, brown skin shines in the spotlight. Hands car...

On his mysterious island, Dr. Moreau tells a visitor the secret of his macabre experiments: “These creatures you have seen are animals carven and wrought into new shapes. To that, to the study of the p...

Together with three soloists of the renowned Ensemble Contrechamps from Geneva and dancer Maya Masse, Swiss choreographer Maud Blandel tackles a new instrumen­talisation and corporeal interpretation of ...

At first, the two-time Nestroy Prize winner Michael Turinsky wonders if he should write a love letter to communism ‘as a genuine movement’. Or is it a better idea to tweet about socialism and its rela...

Can one’s own body – removed from the self, lost in the digital labyrinth – be found in a dream and be reassembled? Based on notes made each day at four o’clock in the morning by the choreographer and per...

The urgency of the climate crisis not only demands political action but a concerted rethinking of every facet of society. What’s Done / Undone brings together artists and experts for three panel discussions: a...

For two years, in 2020 and 2021, chore­ographers and dancers were invited by the Creative Europe project Life Long Burning to share resources, working processes and artistic practices with the network’s part...

When it comes to recognising the apparent nature of a good many opposites so as to stimulate more complex thinking, these are great times to live in. And this piece, which has been completely reworked...

This is one of dancer, performer, choreogra­pher and visual artist Philipp Gehmacher’s most intimate pieces. Philipp Gehmacher’s solo is divided into two parts and yet is a whole that firmly encloses itsel...

Have you ever been held after drinking too much?  You are puking, you’re completely emptied out, but can’t stop gagging …. Have you ever been held in that moment? Someone, a group of friends, holding your h...

How do these four dancers bring a club setting to the stage of a theatre? In a truly mistressfully fashion and with a great deal of sensitivity for their cause! Which, incidentally, is house dance: the...

Manhattan, 1994. South African dancer Robyn Orlin watches homeless people seeking shelter in refrigerator packaging on the Lower East Side. She struggles to find a working space and begins to develop ...

“Digging beneath the surface“ could be the Austrian choreographer’s motto, who was awarded the prestigious H13 Lower Austria Prize for Performance in 2021. Inspired by Steve McQueen’s Western Deep, Sar...

What can Theocritus’ and Virgil’s hymns of praise to Earth tell us about the ruins that are mere shadows of their original splendour? Is it even possible that they refer to the same world? In Hopeless., Berli...

Schuhplatteln without lederhosen, is that even possible? It is, but it’s painful. At any rate, it’s what Upper Austrian choreographer Simon Mayer does in this plucky danced attempt at liberating folklore fro...

What moves you and us, how does that feel? And: how does it work, this being moved deep down inside? To begin with, Simon Mayer focuses on breathing. This is what it’s like when air flows into and out of...

Is it possible to meet an animal - that with its three hearts and eight arms seems almost extraterrestrial - at eye level without depriving it of its fascinatingly different intelligence, without breaking...

For two minutes and fifty­six seconds / the both of us / yowled, / shortly before the sloth poured the bucket of car paint over them. / In the glove compartment, a fish in a negligee / is singing ballads i...

The Time*Sailors are back! It’s been more than a quarter of a century since the crew of Vienna’s Tanz*Hotel first set out dancing as Time*Sailors: Destination unknown and back! This time around, Captai...

A man approaches a beauty wearing dark sunglasses and a long white dress. The two find each other interesting, he offers himself as an armchair. An intimate song by Tom Waits starts to play. The dancer...

The ImPulsTanz audience may still remember Tiran Willemse from Trajal Harrell’s celebrated Maggie the Cat at Akademietheater. He now engages in his very own aesthetic in blackmilk (melancholia), the fi...

Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert, the best-selling jazz solo record of all time, has served as a soundtrack for countless people for almost fifty years, in vulnerable moments as well as ecstatic ones. But be...

the mingled universes of Wim Vandekeybus, Olivier de Sagazan & Charo Calvo There is a mystical quality to the bodies smeared with clay and paint, swirling, stumbling and plunging their way through archaic...

The impact this man has had on late modern dance from the late 1980s onwards is enormous. Wim Vandekeybus started an aesthetic revolution at the age of 24 when he founded the company Ultima Vez and presented...

Who is Emmanuel ‘Mani’ Obeya? Willi Dorner, a fixture of the Viennese dance scene, had long conversations with Obeya, which evolved into this solo for the Nigerian­ born dancer, singer songwriter and ...

This [ImPulsTanz Classic] is a hit! Its premiere in Paris in 2004 turned into the theatre scandal of the year and made No Paraderan unforgettable. Even the beginning is ironic: “I love Vegas when I...

“I will undertake it and I will cut down the Cedar / It is I who will establish fame for eternity!” King Gilgamesh talks big in the Sumerian epic named after him, which British choreographer Akram Kha...

Rebetiko is regarded as the blues of Greece. Anyone who connects it with a holiday feeling can now add a new layer to this association. Rebetis means ‘drifter’ or ‘tough guy’, in the sense of some...

It takes courage to tackle big issues because somehow everything of importance seems to already have been discussed or published at some point. Guilherme Botelho, director and choreographer of the...

You fall and get back up, you collapse and rise again; you go to bed and get up in the morning, the night welcomes you and the day catches up with you, winter and summer, year after year. The cyclical...

A hypersensitive figure moves through her performance’s current of time with phenomenal precision. Her charisma injects the strict aesthetic and formal perfection with an unpredictable quality. When A...

Astrit Ismaili, once queer shooting star of the Kosovar visual arts scene and now based in Amsterdam, has teamed up for the pop operetta MISS to sound by Vincent Arp with a “First Flower” (Iv...

Ivo Dimchev is back. And indeed, after his already legendary concerts like the Selfie Concert, where out of sheer enthusiasm physical contact could not be avoided, the famous international Bulgarian...

Hooray, we are alive! And there is hope: Hasn’t the situation improved a lot in the 15 years since the world premiere of this magnificent and intensely debated performance by French choreographer M...

The body, the images. Trails left by the movements of life, the sound of feelings, the echoes of which follow the dancer. This can indeed be somewhat scary. And then, pondering one’s own decisions: w...

In 1913, Igor Stravinsky and Vaslav Nijinsky produced a scandalous classic that has been reinterpreted many times since then: Le sacre du printemps, also known as The Rite of Spring. Now, Dada Masilo,...

It’s enough to drive you up the wall! The ranting, grumbling and shouting has been so mercilessly pushed into a corner that it was about to fall into oblivion, had it not been for an angry woman w...

How can dance choreographies that were created in the 1930s, for example, still be danced in the 2020s? With bodies that, after almost a century, are informed, trained and shaped completely differently...

“FLUFF somehow grew out of its title. fluff as something soft like the feathers of a bird or maybe some dust in a corner and also fluff as something trivial, superficial or something d...

Recalling Her Dance a choreographic encounter with Hanna Berger The dance solo Die Unbekannte aus der Seine was created in 1941/42 during the National Socialist dictatorship. Paris had been...

During the day, they are people of a mature age in suits. But another life begins at night. That’s when the disguise is stripped off and soon, scene by scene, extravagant personalities in fantastic r...

His dances level out hierarchies and make familiar surroundings fade away. French-born Swedish choreographer Frédéric Gies has co-created this gripping piece with the Weld Company from Stockholm, f...

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....

For his new solo, dancer and choreographer Ian Kaler asked three artistic companions to choreograph for him. The opening video prologue of footage (cinematography: Diara Sow) of Ian Kaler performing...

Human togetherness has always been complicated, but today the challenges it poses for all of us on a global scale manifest themselves in increasing detail. Choreographer Idio Chichava from Mozambique...

FVLCRVM (SK) live DJ support: Kristian Davidek (FM4 Davideks), Moska (radio nula, DJ saraieva) On the tipping edge between mainstream and underground, Eastern Europe suburb embossed...

GNUČČI (SE/YU) live DJ support: Dalia Ahmed (FM4), DJ Phekt (FM4) On two dates, the festival lounge welcomes you to very special nights in the whole building of the Kursalon Wien: welcome t...

With Germaine Acogny (SN), Jose Agudo (UK/ES), Ivo Dimchev (BG), Chris Haring & Liquid Loft (AT), Raja Feather Kelly (US), Klangforum Wien (AT), Koffi Kôkô (FR/BJ), Louise Lecavalier (CA), Susanne Li...

A woman who danced ahead of her time, a feminist who, at the end of the 19th century, kissed then restrictive conventions like the corset and pointe shoes goodbye, a dancer of what is called ‘Apollonian b...

One thing is certain: what unfolds here is the possibility of an expedition into the realm of love. “We try to reveal as much of ourselves to the spectators as we do to someone we love.”The audience is ...

Lem’s work illuminates our time like a great headlight – his 100th birthday anniversary could not fall more congenially into the current present. Inspired by Lem’s late work Fiasco, writt...

In a world of post­-xxx, what the heck does it mean to become an engineer of one’s own desire? Does eros still have a chance? And what has happened to catharsis? Lau Lukkarila in...

Brina was her partisan name: Marta Paulin was among the first modern dancers in Slovenia before the Second World War. Born in Ljubljana in 1911, the student of Mary Wigman’s method worked for the r...

How does one become a dancer in the first place? Which secrets lie in the works that a young dance student learns, for example in Athens, where Lenio Kaklea started dancing at the age of ten? And how...

Performance Situation Room Showing By and with the artists and artist collectives Beatrix Simkó (HU), Divert / Inclusive Movement Research Collective (HR), Laura Kirshenbaum (FR/IL), Ofelia Jarl ...

Still / Stranger Than Paradise  (live / on screen) What the...? Our bodies are effectively on their way to obsolescence? Well, it seems we have paid far too little attention until now and looked...

“I am alone onstage – plunged into a maze with my frenzy.” This is how Canadian dance icon Louise Lecavalier describes the state she subjects herself to in her new solo Stations. In it, she manoeuvres throu...

A woman is getting to grips with reality wearing red gloves, she outgrows her footstool, and an ‘intermezzo film’ blossoms from a dance piece, showing something that is rarely seen: the dance of pla...

Lem’s work is more than ever a challenge for contemporary art. ImPulsTanz and Klangforum Wien have commissioned composers Wojtek Blecharz and Mikołaj Laskowski, as well as choreographers Malika Fa...

How wonderful: blindfolded, smoking a cigarette after a drinking game (whisky shots), the bare toes playing around between triggered rat traps. Or climbing up the façade of a house at night ...

“Southern trees bear a strange fruit”, Billie Holiday sings in a voice that is both strong and delicate. “Blood on the leaves and blood at the root / Black bodies swingin’ in the Southern breeze / Stran...

Time speeds up and slows down, it presses, drifts or plummets like a waterfall. For choreographer Meg Stuart, time is a multi-dimensional cascade in which “different realities exist at the same time”, as ...

Vortices of energy can form in the dynamics of everyday reality. When you reach your ‘event horizon’, you could be drawn into something uncontrollable. Just like the five performers in VIOLET. The...

Screens Are My New Clothes.  Extended Album Release Show The piece demonstrates what Covid-19 might have turned many of us into: lockdown-isolated ‘zoombies’ in screen clothes. The digitalisation of ...

Like Maguy Marin, Ismael Ivo or Jan Fabre, for example, he belongs to the golden generation of dance and performance art that emerged in the roaring eighties and swept the European theatre stages with...

Dance with its countless possibilities is even capable of walking. If necessary, as far as a hundred kilometres in three days, as happened in May 2015, when Foofwa d’Imobilité initiated su...

Archives are wonderful. This young man owns one and he calls it his ‘personal art archive’, compiled by him over the past decade: memories of contemporary dance pieces, books, music and films. Pet...

Artists involved: Steven Cohen (FR/ZA), Julius Deutschbauer (AT), Ivo Dimchev (BG), Jule Flierl (DE) & Irena Z. Tomažin (SI), Lenio Kaklea (FR/GR), Thomas Köck (DE/AT), Jennifer L...

Steve Paxton is back! Not in person, but in the form of his famous improvisation on Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations from the 1980s. This gem from postmodern dance history is d...

Extravagant clothes, sumptuous drapes of fabric, a melting voice, lascivious looks. This is PRICE, the hybrid persona of artist Mathias Ringgenberg, navigating once more between heteronormative...

“I am an Ugly man”, says the dancer, choreographer and director of the company the feath3r theory. And: “I am not an artist like those who created Beyoncé.” Neither does he see himself as one of N...

African American subjectivity is being displaced from pop culture. This is what this second part of Raja Feather Kelly’s UGLY trilogy is about, in which the New York performer continues w...

This is the third and concluding part of the pop queer empathy trilogy UGLY, which will be first performed at ImPulsTanz. Raja Feather Kelly, choreographer, dancer and director of the...

Immerse yourself in the world of early New York dance postmodernism, feel what it was like at a time of new departures when dancers discovered new movements every day: as co-founder of the legendary...

What do a historic Disney film, a popular form of musical composition, an Arabian horse show and this clever dance solo have in common? Correct: the name fantasia. But choreographer and dancer...

The distancing rules due to the pandemic are still in place. After a year and a half, maintaining a distance has left its mark on society. The exact nature of which has yet to be explored. Viennese...

The voices of birds, whose chants and songs can be heard in this performance, are either irretrievably lost or belong to endangered species. In this dreamlike yet highly realistic and compelling performance,...

Shyness isn’t an attribute of the characters that Sophia Rodríguez transforms into on stage in front of her audience. This became clear when she entangled herself in a huge vulva made of fabric to...

To the intricate soundtrack of a club night, FIEBRE departs from a fictional landscape and explores a sensual, gooey material. FIEBRE is a raw, intimate and inceptive space where...

The matter lab – initiated by Meg Stuart in conversation with Moriah Evans, Mieko Suzuki, Varinia Canto Vila, Edna Jaime and Claire Vivianne Sobottke – is a collective exp...

Would you believe it, there once were patriarchs who were addressed as ‘Big Daddy’, like the plantation owner Harvey Pollitt in Tennessee Williams’ play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. First performed in th...