haunted landscape/s by Claudia Bosse / theatercombinat
haunted landscape/s is a multi-part performance series along 2024 and turns to wounded, haunted landscapes, landscapes that escape. haunted landscape/s is a walk-in composition of images, bodies, sounds, movements that haunt us. strange beings evoke myths and carry history with them, strange figures open wounds, distortions of our planet. with dusty hands they dance with time, the clouds, the wind, they dance on the horizon, in fields, in front of machines and the silhouette of a new city.
the landscape
is both evading and present at the same time
is an assemblage of factors that create it
is a superposition of times
the landscape
is many landscapes they were before
and they will become
it’s an archive of climate and circumstance and imprints of beings
the landscape is never the same
in haunted landscape/s, different wounded landscapes come together - people, volcanoes, mines, construction sites on the outskirts of vienna. the seestadt aspern, once the site of the napoleonic battle, later an airfield and since the 2010s one of europe's largest urban development projects - now a place to search for traces, ghosts that inhabit the landscape.
a sojourn at the cracks of the earth, together with furious dancers, movement choirs obsessively haunting, missing and surveying dwindling landscapes, with voices and sounds as if they came from the interior of the earth. a land survey, a dance, an incantation with texts by heiner müller's "herakles 2 oder die hydra" and notations by claudia bosse.
haunted landscape/s is about our relationship to landscape/s, what we need and abuse them for, what we do to them and why. it is about vast transformations of environments and their global impact. it is about poisoned landscapes. it is about traces of ghosts inhabiting wounded landscapes and their influence on the surrounding communities. it is also about persephone, her theft from hades into the underworld, the protest of demeter, who, out of grief for her daughter, allows the earth to become desolate until she has persephone back. it is about endangered landscapes and their experiences. it is about our planet, how we understand it and live with it - ourselves part of it.
as a structure of soils, water, stones, light and temperatures, landscapes are permeated by the traces of their human and non-human inhabitants. while the landscapes visibly bear the signs and wounds of their encroachments, the various geological layers overlap and change, are discarded, shifted, displaced, condensed.
a landscape
a landscape in my dreams
a landscape which was a city
a landscape which is devastated in my dreams
a devastating dream
a landscape
to find a space
to calm the inside tissues of my body and the convolution of my brain
to rest in an outside
but the untouched regions are gone
the landscapes of imagination are conquered
colonised
taken
so where my troubled dreams can settle
with haunted landscape/s, claudia bosse turns her attention to wounded landscapes in a multi-part performance series, starting on the wasteland in front of and inside the seestadt studios in vienna's seestadt aspern from 08 to 12 may.
in june, the series will continue in the forest on lake wörthersee in carinthia and will come to a provisional conclusion at the end of october on the stage of the tanzquartier vienna.
Credits:
concept/choreography/space/objects: claudia bosse
performance: anna biczok, lena schattenberg, carla rihl, claudia bosse and irwan ahmett live sound: günther auer
moving choir A: aysel caglar, amena choudhry, maité coronado gonzalez, senol ekiz, leo ertl, maria holgado reyes, manija hosseinkhel, lenka kvietkova, jeremiah marcos, irene ramharter, fabrizio sink, franz-luis stockhammer, luca strobl, sami tarig, sinan uslu of the jugend am werk am seebogen institution
moving choir B: elias austaller, bea maria friedl, maria harrison, ines kaiser, maria ketscher, veronika kritzer, daniela graf-kunauer, anna leithner, susa muzler, hannah resatz, salphinah savin, johanna tatzgern, mariella schwarten, silvia anna weitlaner, christa zuna-kratky of theatercombinat's public performance school PPS
dramaturgy: adam czirak, krassimira kruschkova
clothing: julia zastava
technical realisation: marco tölzer, christopher schulz
production/assistance: larry meyer
internship: laura bein
communication: magdalena knor
production: dilâ kırmızıtoprak
premiere: 08 may 2024, 19h
further performances: 10 may 2024, 19h; 11/12 may 2024, 17h
location: on the wasteland in front of and in the seestadt studios
am-ostrom-park 11, 1220 vienna
photos: Markus Gradwohl
thanks to georg blaschke, martin penz and dagmar tröstler
with texts by heiner müller's "herakles 2 oder die hydra" and claudia bosse; henschel SCHAUSPIEL
a production by theatercombinat in cooperation with aspern3420, jugend am werk and theatercombinat's public performance school PPS.
a production by theatercombinat, funded as part of a 2022-2025 concept grant from stadt wien kultur, the federal ministry of arts and culture, public service and sport and the district of donaustadt.