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The performance features stories of people we encountered in our life, people who are or once were important to us, but cannot be here with us at this moment. It might be a sister, childhood friend, teacher, first-love or even star-artists.
Three performers remember them, dedicate a dance to them and sometimes even become them. No matter if we love or hate one another, whether you are here or not, we all belong together.
Concept, artistic direction: Michikazu Matsune
Performance: Michikazu Matsune, Frans Poelstra, Elizabeth Ward
Tour management, assistance: Franziska Zaida Schrammel
Production: Studio Matsune
With support by the Cultural Department of the City of Vienna / MA7
Norway tour supported by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Arts, Culture, Civil Service and Sports, DANCE ON TOUR AUSTRIA – a project by Tanzquartier Wien in cooperation with the Federal Ministry for European and International Affairs
In cooperation with RIMI/IMIR Stavanger
Born and raised in the seaside town of Kobe in Japan and based in Vienna since the 1990s, Michikazu Matsune is an artist whose practice ranges from stage performance and interventions in public and private spaces to instruction pieces and conversation projects. At the crossroads between conceptual and documentary approaches in which poetry, humour, the absurd, and criticism meet, his distinctive method examines the friction between identity and globalisation, action and language, the public and private. His work has been presented in renowned venues and festivals including Festival d’Avignon, Festival d’Automne Paris, Kyoto Experiment, Spring Festival Utrecht, ImPulsTanz Wien, Tanzquartier Wien, Wiener Festwochen, among many others. Matsune’s stage work Kono atari no dokoka / Somewhere around here (2023), made in collaboration with French choreographer Martine Pisani and Dutch performer Theo Kooijman, retraces the pathways of the three protagonists through the 1980s and 1990s. His solo work Mitsouko Mitsuko (2021) centres on the lives of two Japanese women, with almost identical names, who lived through the turbulence of global modernism. All Together (2018) is a trio performance based on anecdotes of people who cannot be here with us at this moment. Goodbye (2016) is a solo work with farewell letters written by famous and anonymous individuals from the global archive. Matsune has developed various projects in public spaces including Moving Exhibition (2022) and What The Hell (2017-19). He is also the initiator of Homesick Festival (since 2017), a unique performance festival that takes place in private homes, and The Institute of Sleepless Nights (since 2022), a practice-based research project devoted to the art of sleeplessness and a wide range of troubles related to the act of sleeping. Matsune teaches performance-practice and has been a guest tutor at the University of Arts Linz and Iceland University of the Arts. www.michikazumatsune.info
Born 1977 in Detroit, Elizabeth Ward is a choreographer and performer currently living in Vienna. Previously she has lived and worked in New York City, Athens, Brussels, and Portland. Her work explores the collective histories of dance lineages accumulated in a dancer’s muscle memory as a living archaeology. Some of the performance festivals and venues she has been presented by include the Kitchen (NYC), Danspace Projects (NYC), Movement Research at the Judson Church (NYC), Disjecta (Portland), Tanzquartier (Vienna), steirischerherbst (Graz), Wiener Festwochen (Vienna), ANA (Copenhagen), and Trinosophes (Detroit). As a performer, she has collaborated and participated in the works of Frédéric Gies, Michikazu Matsune, Cathy Weis, Manuel Pelmus, DD Dorvillier, Miguel Gutierrez, Jennifer Lacey, and Anne Juren, amongst others.
Born 1954 in Amsterdam, Frans Poelstra is a performer, dancer, musician, teacher and advisor in the field of contemporary performance. Having studied at SNDO, he focused on dance/music improvisations with Katie Duck, David Zambrano, Sasha Waltz, Mark Tompkins, Vera Mantero, Steve Paxton, and Benoit Lachambre, among others, in the 80s and 90s. In 2003 he founded united sorry with Robert Steijn. Based in Vienna since 2004, he has created a series of solo performances, mostly around autobiographical stories. Besides collaborating with many local artists, he is a co-director of Mellow Yellow, an inclusion art project for school children, with Vera Rosner and Elisabeth Löffler.
