ImPulsTanz Revue.
Ein Tanzgespräch

We warmly invite our highly esteemed audience, artists and colleagues to join Martina Gimplinger, Eike Wittrock and Chris Standfest (ImPulsTanz) in looking back on the 2025 festival together.

Four and a half weeks of intense watching, dancing, celebrating and coming together around contemporary dance, music and performance are behind us – and ImPulsTanz enjoyed a greater audience response than ever before.
At the same time, for the ImPulsTanz Pop-Up Archive, and at the invitation of mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, we published for the very first time a preliminary and by no means complete collection from over 40 years of festival history. And so this year, in the midst of all the posters, photographs and videos, we would like to once again talk together – about individual pieces as well as impressions from the workshops and from the Public Moves classes – and share thoughts and experiences on dance and dancing. Whether on stage, in the studio or in the club: dance moves us, raises questions about physical togetherness, about forms of representation and expression, as well as about society and politics. We wish to pursue these questions together with Martina Gimplinger and Eike Wittrock, who not only contributed outstanding texts for this year’s Falter festival supplement, but also closely accompanied ImPulsTanz 2025 through attending performances, teaching and taking part in workshops.

We look forward to welcoming you and to your questions and thoughts!

Martina Gimplinger holds a doctorate in cultural studies and is interested in the aesthetic and ethical power of performance, dance and theatre. In her research, she examined embodied forms of engaging with suppressed Western histories of violence in the work of long-standing ImPulsTanz artists Clara Furey and Faustin Linyekula. Drawing on her research focus, she co-curated with Frida Robles Ponce in April 2025 the performative format Embodied (Hi)stories: Confronting the Art Collection at mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Wien as part of the exhibition Never Final! The Evolving Museum. This invited the artists Rehema Chachage and Michael Turinsky to engage with a work from the mumok collection. In 2022, she served as a jury member for the ImPulsTanz Young Choreographers’ Award of the [8:tension] Young Choreographers’ Series. In 2025–2026, she is directing the City of Vienna-funded artistic and academic research project Archiv des Zuhörens (Archive of Listening), which addresses the affective dimensions of remembrance.

Eike Wittrock has been Professor of Dance Studies at the Musik und Kunst Privatuniversität der Stadt Wien (MUK) since 2023. Alongside extensive research and teaching engagements in Berlin, Hildesheim, Graz and numerous dramaturgical projects in dance and music theatre, he was Co-Curator of the International Summer Festival Kampnagel from 2013–2016, a jury member of Tanzplattform 2016 and curatorial advisor to the Tanzkongress 2019 – A Long Lasting Affair, Hellerau/Dresden, with Meg Stuart. Together with Anna Wagner, he initiated the Julius-Hans-Spiegel-Zentrum, an artistic and academic research project on exoticisms in modern dance, as well as The Greatest Show on Earth. Ein internationaler Performance-Zirkus für das 21. Jahrhundert (An International Performance Circus for the 21st Century), featuring, among others, Florentina Holzinger & Vincent Riebeek, Meg Stuart, Hendrik Quast & Maika Knoblich, Antonia Baehr and Eisa Jocson. He is currently also a guest of the DFG Network Queere Zeitgeschichten im deutschsprachigen Europa (Queer Contemporary Histories in German-speaking Europe).

CREDITS

RELATED