Doris Uhlich - Habitat. Photo 1+2: Habitat / Halle E at Tanzquartier Wien, Vienna, Austria, 2019. Photos © Theresa Rauter

Habitat 


Habitat is a site-specific performance by Doris Uhlich that is  developed in different places and with a big number of local performers, professionals and non-professionals. In each location, Doris Uhlich is interested in working with large groups of performers, which are developed temporarily at specific places in order to transform dance into a collective ritual.

In Habitat naked bodies flick, vibrate and slap against each other to electronic sounds and abstract techno tracks. The performers celebrate their unity in diversity.  As individuals and as a crowd at the same time they conquer the space in a choreography that is captivating, highly energetic and, at times, collectively reposing. The space it is transformed into a “habitat” full of unexpected life forms – the audience moves about freely in the available space. Habitat transcends conventional ideas of the body, of dance and of nakedness in a subversive manner. Habitat is a utopia. A shameless but also a free-of- shame hymn to a naked body beyond cultural inscriptions and conventional ideals of beauty. The body is not devalued to the level of a fetish, an object; and carnality is neither metaphorically nor poetically ideologized but understood in a material sense and is therefore presented in all its mass and weight yet also in its fragility.

Doris Uhlich creates spaces of possibilities through which she immerses bodies of all forms, origins, genders, and abilities into sophisticated contemporary rituals. For her, the beauty of a (dancing) body does not lie in the reproduction of the established cult of thinness, fitness, and youth as shaped and sculpted. She rather questions this current state of corporeality and searches for possibilities and strategies to re-shape and re-sculpture our understanding of the subject.


CREDITS

Concept, Choreography 

Doris Uhlich


Dramaturgical consultant 

Theresa Rauter

Artistic assistents, Production 

Sebastian Lorenz
Theresa Rauter


Choreographic realisation (when more than 90 people perform)

Robyn/Hugo Le Brigand

DJ
Boris Kopeinig
 


Light Design 

Gerald Pappenberger, Jan Wagner


Coproduction 

Tanzquartier Wien 
insert (Theaterverein)




Distribution 
Something Great 

insert (Theaterverein) is funded by the Cultural Department of the City of Vienna and the Federal Chancellery of Austria.


ITERATIONS

Previous iterations of “Habitat” include:

Habitat / Trondheim (Rosendal Teater, Trondheim, Norway, 2022);  Habitat / Köln  (Schauspiel Köln / Britney X Festival, Cologne, Germany, 2022); Habitat / Domenig Steinhaus (Steindorf am Ossiacher, Austria), Habitat / Bristol, (The Galleries as part Mayfest - Bristol Biennial Festival of Contemporary Theatre, UK, 2022);  Habitat / Marseille (La Friche Belle de Mai, Marseille, France, 2022); Habitat / Halle E ( Tanzquartier Wien- Halle E, Vienna, Austria, 2019); Habitat / Secession Wien (Wiener Secession as part of ImPulsTanz, Vienna, Austria, 2017).