A performer crouches, holding a piece of chain mail between their teeth.

UPROAR

Simone Aughterlony & Michael Günzburger

UPROAR is an immersive performance which summons the highly relevant figure of the Chimera as an expressive embodiment, expanding the horizon of what it means to be plural. With numerous responsibilities, fantasies and realities all at once, antiquities Chimeric figure — part lion, part goat, part snake — celebrates the value and tethering of three or more.

Towards a body politic that embraces the un-rendering of determined entities, Aughterlony’s choreographic language inscribes contradictory and temporary fusions of contemporary chimeric figures. Visual art collaborator, Günzburger practices choreography as a spontaneous event designed by a set of conditions invited to the printing surface. Together with their collaborators they take pleasure in the erotics and recognition of distinct parts alongside the irrefutable combination of complex organisms. Though temporary, the extra-ordinary emergence of these singularities reveals transitory solutions in flux, acknowledging their interdependence as a flourishing act.

Sound propagation materials shaped into impressive architectural structures form an enclosure for the study and imagination of a creature to come. Attention to sound by Berlin duo LABOUR, strategizes an hallucinatory experience. Taken apart, the movement of these ‘wall figures’ transition from an enclosure to an expanded and flexible space. In this sense, a process of dismantling what was previously an enclosure gives permission for any number of spatial chimeric proposals or mirage-like sightings to take shape. The question of positionality and perspective is renegotiated as the performers navigate feelings of bewilderment and awe. UPROAR is the turmoil. The impossible is not opposed to the real, the impossible composes with the real and promises a trans*futurism of the wildly imaginative.

Credits

Concept & direction
Simone Aughterlony, Michael Günzburger
Creation & performance
Bast Hippocrate/Thomas Vantuycom, Pierre Piton, Adél Juhász
Musical composition
LABOUR (Farahnaz Hatam, Colin Hacklander)
Architectural design
Nele Dechmann
Lighting design
Joseph Wegmann
Dramaturgical advice
Jorge Leòn, Saša Božic
Stage direction
Jan Olieslagers
Technical direction
Marie Prédour
Costume design
Marquet K. Lee
Production, administration
Umar Hallawi
Stage construction
SLS Illusion – Silas Meier
Photography
Simon Courchel
Egg development
Simon Callens
Translation
Brigitte Helbling
Production coordination
Marc Streit

Images

  • A performer lies prone on the floor, entangled in a thick golden rope around the wrist and shoulder.
    © Simon Courchel
  • A performer sits against a patterned wall striped with bands of light and shadow, holding a large egg between their legs while struggling with a blue rope.
    © Simon Courchel
  • A nude performer stands facing a perforated metal wall, holding a mass of curly wigs above their head like an extension of their body.
    © Simon Courchel