Liquid Loft / Chris Haring (AT)
Modern Chimeras

© Chris Haring

On his mysterious island, Dr. Moreau tells a visitor the secret of his macabre experiments: “These creatures you have seen are animals carven and wrought into new shapes. To that, to the study of the plasticity of living forms, my life has been devoted.” The mad doctor’s guest in H. G. Wells’ novel from 1896 learns that the animals are being transformed into human-like chimeras. The motif of hybrid creatures runs through the mythologies of many ancient cultures, and the human-made chimera became a topic of interest in modernism. For Liquid Loft, it’s the material from which they have developed their new piece with mastermind Chris Haring. The dancers’ bodies combine to form strange combinations in optically deceptive fabrics and costumes that confound the gaze and inspire the imagination. Modern Chimeras is also utopian in that it declares equality between creatures, the avoidance of hierarchies and an end to those crutches that are called coherence and order.