UNTER_BODEN

Unter_boden is a dance piece created by SILK Fluegge. It moves in both the past and the present. Choreographed by Silke Grabinger, the piece reaches for Austrian-Jewish Choreographer Gertrud Bodenwieser, who fled to Australia, and explores her piece Demon Machine from 1924. Demon Machine deals with the end of a paradisaic state through a group’s metamorphosis into a machine. At the same time, Unter_boden cannot linger in the past – if the past is even reached. When dealing with Bodenwieser’s themes, one question arises: what is technology, once a violent machinery, becoming? What is happening through digitalisation? This evening is also torn between utopian potential and dystopian expressions, between the protecting golem and suppressing demon. Has the violent machine disappeared in the face of digitalisation? Has only the visible face escaped, has violence settled down on an immaterial level? Has it taken seemingly non-violent forms? Just like this performance, we humans are also living in this tension between the past and present, between hope and dread, between violent machines and caring – or ensnaring? – programs. But perhaps we will succeed in pulling the threads and look beyond the ground itself. A ground that either moves human artifacts into utopian light or knocks them into dystopian darkness.