Freda Fiala

writer, researcher and curator focused on performance-based artistic practices

HYBRID BODIES


2023

with
Betty Apple, Claudia Bosse / Institute of Dance Arts (IDA) / Kunstuniversität Linz, TANZ LINZ


BRID BODIES presented site-specific performances in and on the museum rooftop of Offenes Kulturhaus (OK) Linz



PERFORMANCES
flowers, bodies and STONES

flowers, bodies and STONES opens as a parcours through the spaces of OK. Hybrid beings move in fragmented environments, accompanied by in/organic material. Bodies root themselves and branch out across the museum’s floors until they finally reach its rooftop. They interweave the gallery spaces through means of rhizomatic relations and timelines. In/stability, transformation, decay and the un/canny are the motifs of the immersive performance by Claudia Bosse with students from the Institute of Dance Arts of the Anton Bruckner Private University and the Kunstuniversität Linz.

Claudia Bosse with Alejandra Benet Garcia, Jiaji Cheng, Ariathney Coyne, Arkadiusz Hryb, Laura Gagliardi, Polina Kliuchnikova, Neža Kokalj, Kristina Kollarova, Veronika Maidukova, Lucia Mauri, Veronica Pace, Emilia Vogt, Sofiia Zeifert

Mermaid Escape Room

Betty Apple's Mermaid Escape Room brings us in touch with our inner sea creature. The Taiwanese artist and musician fuses mermaid fantasies with queer science fiction. Inspired by Chinese mythology such as the "Classic of Mountains and Seas" (Shanghaijing) the figure of the mermaid relates to questions of gender identity, fluidity and transformation. To the pulsating rhythm of her noise compositions, Betty Apple invites audiences to celebrate all that is alluring and unknown.

Performance Betty Apple Live-Sound Betty Apple, Social Dis Dance, vvxxii Installation vvxxii
Media design, generative AI Brandon Tay 

LABO TRACES

With LABO TRACES, TANZ LINZ presents itself as a collective that unites in diversity. The performers’ differences in origin, age, physicality and dance vocabulary form the starting point for their searching for interconnections. Following its premiere in the dance studios of the Musiktheater, the performance will now be staged outside the theatre for the first time, as it spreads across the large rooftop of OK.

Choreography and Dance Hinako Taira, Yu-Teng Huang Supervision Yuko Harada Sounddesign Hodei Iriarte Kaperotxipi          Dramaturgy Roma Janus TANZ LINZ Elena Sofia Bisci, Matteo Cogliandro, Yu-Teng Huang, Katharina Illnar, Angelica Mattiazzi, Pavel Povrazník, Lorenzo Ruta, Arthur Samuel Sicilia, Nicole Stroh, Hinako Taira, Pedro Tayette, Fleur Wijsman 

Production director Roma Janus Production Charlotte Morschhausen Training director Yuko Harada Outreach Simone Rupp

Graphic Design: studio yukiko
Photos: Robert Maybach

THE NON-FUNGIBLE BODY?

17-20 June 2022

With
Cibelle Cavalli Bastos, Alexandre Bouvier, Marita Bullmann, Yun-Chen Chang, Beatrice Didier, Jan Hakon Erichsen, Maria Kulikovska, David Henry Nobody Jr. in conversation with Anika Meier, Sara Lanner, Sajan Mani, Boris Nieslony, Yiannis Pappas, Jianan Qu, Xavier Le Roy, Sarah Trouche, Rong Xie (Echo Morgan)

Together with River Lin, I initiated and curated the first edition of The Non-fungible Body performance festival in Linz in June 2022. The festival gathered artists whose practice deal with the interface of body and archive, live performance and documentation, and with performance in relation to internet cultures. 

“Die schrille, schräge, feinsinnige Welt der Performance zeigen – das war das Ziel des ersten Festivals dieser Art in Linz” – Herbert Schorn, OÖ Nachrichten

“With this new performance festival, OK Linz director Alfred Weidinger initiates a new chapter for Austrian performance art scene. Bringing together a diversity of artists (from performance pioneers in the 70s to the latest online ones) makes for a meaningful debut connecting to performance art history.” – Hang Huang, Springback Magazine

“We see performance as an expanded artistic form and medium ranging over visual art, theatre, dance and digital culture. The question of the uniqueness of the artist’s body, which the program brings up, first relates to the notion of documentation and what it means to categorise performances as artistic works.” –River Lin, Les Nouveaux Riches Magazine


“A Non-fungible Body? suggests a singular body—a body that through its singularity is irreducible, resilient, and complex. Similarly, the Non-fungible Body points to the coming together of artists and audiences as an essential aspect of performance; it focuses our thoughts upon the shared experience of meeting and experiencing; it implies the dazzling conditions of the ephemeral, and of the physicality and the affect that links performance to its subversive, assertively disturbing, and critical potential; it is seemingly an ideal term when it comes to capturing how performance art practices are commonly projected upon. Yet, what happens to those all too well known IRL assumptions in the age of AFK?”                        – Freda Fiala, curatorial essay

Graphic Design: studio yukiko

Photos: Robert Maybach, Nurith Wagner-Strauss