O! A Biography

Eva-Maria Schaller / Matthias Kranebitter / Irene Delgado-Jiménez / Black Page Orchestra: O! A Biography

Fri 15. & Sat 16.11., 19.30h, Dance/Music, Premiere

Eva-Maria Schaller’s choreographic work has revolved around an emancipatory, embodied dance historiography for many years. This new major work, a contemporary opéra-ballet with a composition by Matthias Kranebitter, begins with the biography of a dancer and plunges deep into her own memories on and behind the stage. Fragments of opera scenes, deposits of ballet sequences, fluid forms of movement and narratives for individual and collective reassessment can be found there. If the body is the archive of a dancing life, it is a chaotic one made up of a great many fragments, perspectives and fantastic realities that go beyond the time horizon of an individual life. Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s "Orlando", Schaller is looking for the utopia of a biography that extends beyond time, place and the social apparatus of gender production in "O! A Biography". The kaleidoscopic dance through the centuries clearly shows: "As a dancer, I am many."  

In collaboration with Wien Modern 

Artist Talk following the performance on Sat 16.11., theatre scholar Stefan Hulfeld in conversation with participants in the production. In German. The talk will be translated into Austrian Sign Language (ÖGS).