Rakete 2025

Rakete

02. to 23.05., curated by Lewon Heublein

A new generation of choreography & performance

With performances by: Abigail Aleksander & Mary Szydłowska, Chiara Bartl-Salvi, Ivan Cheng, gergő d. farkas, Zoé Lakhnati & Per Anders Kraudy Solli, Netti Nüganen mit Pire Sova & KISLING, Jakob Wittkowsky

Supporting programme: Stefan Grimus, Ingeborg Meier Andersen & Sam Fuentes, Gina Merz, Slow Reading Club (Bryana Fritz & Henry Andersen)

"This Is Living Rent Free in My Head": Attention is hybrid and collective – and one of the most important currencies of the 21st century. Instead of giving in to feeling paralysed by daily doomscrolling, the artists invited to this year’s edition of "Rakete" are having a mischievously great time playing off-screen with today’s modes of viewing, which have been accelerated by memes and pandemics. With abstraction, humour, and intimate familiarity, they test various artistic strategies where dance, sound, text and voice interact with the incoherent attentions of the present as pictorial, choreographic and performative material.

Small gestures become poetic acts of everyday rebellion, functional movements become grotesque metaphors, and texts become sweeping streams of sensory overload. At other times, collages of language and figures clash in what amounts to cheerful chaos. At the same time, dances make sparks fly, dramatically seduce, enchant and conceal, and choreographies of internalised landscapes raise the question of what it means to inhabit a body.

Together with the artists – and a supporting programme including a concert, a film screening and a reading group that doesn’t always make it easy for the participants to understand every word – this year’s festival explores presence and forms of presentation at the edge of rationality to fill the spaces in the minds of the audience. And, with a bit of luck, to implant new ideas that go beyond the prevailing attention economy.