On Sunday, 11 August 2024, the winners of the ImPulsTanz – Young Choreographers’ Award, which was launched in 2018, were announced at a ceremony at Odeon:
The artists can look forward to a prize money of 5,000 euro and a two-week artistic residency at ImPulsTanz 2025.
The international jury, consists of curator, dramaturge and author Jette Büchsenschütz, curator Anne Faucheret and choreographer and performer Raja Feather Kelly. They explain their decision as follows:
Witnessing all the work done by a young generation of artists as the jury of the [8:tension] Young Choreographers’ Series was a stimulating privilege and honor.
We attended pieces addressing politics of gaze, tackling the objectifying white-male gaze, proposing new (collective) forms of attention, giving space to unearth the senses, to linger in uncommon temporalities, to indulge into uncanny desires. We experienced performances as introspective experiments, ritual trances, dystopian futuristic scenarios, after-death travel as well as social mirror space. The series succeeded in putting together a true polyphony of works, which, while making our task as jurors more challenging, also made it most exciting. For this we would like to thank the artistic directors Breanna O’Mara, Chris Haring, and the festival team – and above all the artists invited.
As a jury we recognize that curating is inherently selective. While some voices are included many others are excluded. This selection process highlights our privilege and the responsibility we bear as artists, as curators, as a jury. Curating goes beyond selecting and presenting works; it requires care, protection, site responsiveness and awareness of the relationships between artists, audiences, and institutions. Curating is about recognizing one’s own biases and positionality, and working to create a space where pressing issues can be addressed and discussed openly – even more today.
As we engaged with the selected works, we inquired into the choreographic stories that drive them, the ways in which they embody movement, as well as their approaches to representation, production, and reception. We took in mind the structural and geopolitical contexts of each piece, considering the presence and necessity of catharsis. Additionally, we reflected on how our own backgrounds and experiences shaped our perceptions and understanding of the works. While we did not always agree, we found an empowering responsibility in sharing our understandings with one another, our experience, and of course our subjective view.
The festival made all of the eleven [8:tension] choreographers winners already by programming them. As a jury, we decided not to indulge in a spirit of competition, neither to crown a work for its achievement, but for the interest it sparked in us and in order to support it further.
Two works stood out for us, as they presented compelling and timely investigations of contemporary issues, each pushing the boundaries of choreography in its own distinct way. Therefore, we have decided and been given the great opportunity to honor equally two artistic teams and choreographic pieces. The two works differ from each other in every aspect: choreography, imagery, dramaturgy, and their approaches to body politics and affect politics. In fact, the two choreographic proposals are quite opposites, offering unique and contrasting perspectives that enrich our understanding of choreography and dance, while shaking up our comfort zone.
Deva Schubert’s Glitch Choir convinced us by its precisely crafted composition, making it a subtle, multilayered, yet estranging and challenging assemblage of sounds, bodies and emotions. We were highly impressed by the driving force of the glitchy soundscape traversing bodies and space(s), echoing and diffracting, creating at once disorientation, dislocation and a deep connection to collective desiring and grieving, and to their transformative power.
Viní Ventania, Vitòria Jovem / Irmãs Brasil’s Eunuchs offered us a challenging, unsettling, essential and highly political experience, negotiating delicacy and vulnerability with the threatening and the innocent. Whether as Mermaids, Nymphs, Stallions, or Demons, Irmãs Brasil kept audiences and themselves on their feet and in their world. We were highly impressed by the risks they took, choosing exposure, holding gazes, and actively confronting the public with a silent complicity to regimes of othering.
Nominated for the ImPulsTanz – Young Choreographers’ Award were works by a young generation of choreographers, which were presented in the past five weeks as part of the [8:tension] Young Choreographers’ Series at ImPulsTanz. Altogether nine productions offered the audience a varied cross-sectional perspective on current trends and new developments in the realm of dance and performance. This year’s programme was curated by Breanna O’Mara and Chris Haring.
The [8:tension] Young Choreographers’ Series has been presenting the works by newcomers during the ImPulsTanz – Vienna International Dance Festival since 2001. This year, the ImPulsTanz – Young Choreographers’ Award was awarded for the fifth time. It is based on the Prix Jardin d’Europe, which was awarded as part of the EU-sponsored project Life Long Burning in Vienna up to and including 2017.
