Karin Pauer: WE WERE NEVER ONE
In WE WERE NEVER ONE, choreographer Karin Pauer creates a constantly transforming performance installation, in which sculptural elements and live performance coalesce. Embodied texts meet poetic images, human and more-than-human creatures interact. Four performers, a musician, and a visual artist bring to life a circulation of metamorphoses, where each ‘I’ learns that it is also a ‘We’.
‘Living in a time of planetary catastrophe begins with a practice at once humble and difficult: noticing the world around us.’
Anna Tsing et al., Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet
INFO: The show on April 12th will be followed by an artist talk.
Humanity is realising how much everything is tied to everything else – how much we are connected with other people and the world around us. If not before, we learned this the hard way during the pandemic. In her performance installation WE WERE NEVER ONE, choreographer Karin Pauer develops a language of the present and of mindfulness, an ‘embodied language of nowness’, translating this new state of awareness into choreography and movement.
The realisation of our overall connectedness transforms into text, embodied thoughts, hybrid objects, haunted landscapes, sounds of extinction, and encounters in the moment of movement. This creates a practice by which we can learn to perceive our damaged planetary situation. WE WERE NEVER ONE is part of Karin Pauer’s series dances of the anthropocene, which challenges and examines our anthropocentric world view while at the same time trying to devise embodied practices of empathy and care.
Karin Pauer is an Austrian performer and choreographer. Following her studies of choreography at the ArtEZ Institute in Arnheim, the Netherlands, she collaborated with choreographers, film-makers, and visual artists such as Liquid Loft/Chris Haring, Davis Freeman, Mike O’Connor, Maureen Kaegi, and Aldo Giannotti. She has continuously worked with Austria-based dance company Liquid Loft since 2015. Her own pieces were presented at ImPulsTanz, Tanzquartier Wien, Donaufestival, Salzburger Tanztage, Fabrica de Pensule in Cluj, Romania, the Wiener Festwochen, and MAMbo Museum/Bologna. Karin Pauer’s most recent contribution to the brut programme was THE SCORE in 2020. www.karinpauer.com
Credits
Artistic direction Karin Pauer Artistic assistance Arttu Palmio Performance, choreography Anna Biczok, Arttu Palmio, Hugo Le Brigand, Karin Pauer Objects Maureen Kaegi Sound Paolo Monti/the starpillow Light design Sveta Schwin Costume design Karin Pauer Production management mollusca productions
A co-production by Kunstverein ARGO, brut Wien, and MDT Stockholm
With the kind support of the City of Vienna’s Department of Cultural Affairs, the Federal Ministry of Art, Culture, Civil Service and Sport, and Life Long Burning – Towards a sustainable Eco-System for Contemporary Dance in Europe (2018–2022, funded by the European Union’s Creative Crossroads programme).