The event is part of the Big Concert Night. More information...
Ursula Neugebauer puts physical energy on display without introducing it as a body. She fixes this energy between materiality, mechanics and virtuality. She dispenses with real bodies and replaces them with display-window busts to which long, very long ball gowns are attached. Each personage is hooked up to an electrical motor that rotates. At first, the fabric’s outer layer glides at a measured pace. Then the motor turns faster and faster, and the fabric dances, springs, whirls, tosses up ornamental folds until it ecstatically hunts and harries itself.
In many ways, this is reminiscent of von Kleist’s famous essay “On the Marionette Theater,” but in the very last moment of unbridled mechanics, without the objective of gracefulness, all references miss the mark. In contrast, Neugebauer’s work, which is in effect a ballet without a ballerina, subsumes the ghostliness of sheer drapery in terpsichorean, kinetic elegance. The acceleration of imaginary bodies, their outermost freedom, was made possible by absence that catapults itself into a life of its own.
