Strange Gestures

Strange Gestures (Melodramatic Cannibals Inventing Filigree Rituals)

Dance and Performance Festival

Modern society loves acronyms and symbols – signs that use code to represent a superior concept or mark ones’ affiliation with a certain community. While our proclivity for straightforward symbolism increases in digital communication, the expressive potential and legibility of gestures and physical actions remain subject to a deep distrust that brings their indecipherable aspects sharply into focus. The dance and performance festival Strange Gestures presents work by choreographers from across Europe, who unscrupulously operate with gestural citations from everyday life, pop culture and high art, joyfully assimilating them and in the process freeing them from the burden of  indecipherability. Be it the grand gestures of an opera singer, collective headbanging at a rock concert or the quick straightening of a shirt collar – in these pieces, even the seemingly most familiar of gestures are transformed into question marks. Questions that also concern us physically, that seek answers and thus are capable of initiating communication between bodies without the ability to anticipate its course and outcome.

A Künstlerhauses Mousonturm project in cooperation with Aerowaves – dance across europe * Co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union * Concept: Olivia Ebert.