Philipp Gehmacher - In its Entirety

“This will be my second invitation: Twenty years ago, in 2001, my colleagues and I were invited to perform on the occasion of the official opening of Tanzquartier Wien. And now, in 2021, I have been invited to mark the 20-year anniversary of this venue. This will be my fifteenth premiere at TQW. Freeze and look ahead. What is to come? So many things have happened during those two decades. How can my body cope with all the experiences? Where are the words to describe our notions of and wishes for the future?

In its Entirety is a choreographic work in parts that never loses sight of the whole. Speech, voice, movement and sound overlap with personal affect and biography, perhaps even to be overwhelmed – by the ways in which the whole thing can collapse and yet be put back together from all the different pieces. So I will need to go back to my body and back on stage. A stage for the arms and the body. And for the words that can come from within. Is there an inner life to my arms? Even if they guard neither heart nor lungs? Arms are the joints that close and open up spaces, they are expression and touch. But also brutal. The corpus leaves behind the darkness and slowly moves towards the light while the arms are stretched out, to point out – or, rather, to reveal the cracks. ‘Long arms, she said.’ But arms are just as recognisable, and yet they are no signs at all. They are bodies themselves, bodies to record experiences, to preserve, to initiate, to plant, to arrange.” – Philipp Gehmacher

Philipp Gehmacher is a choreographer, dancer and visual artist. He lives and works in Vienna. Gehmacher’s artistic works make use of body and language as forms of expression and treat built and institutional spaces like objects and sculptures.

His works, which are limited neither to black box nor white cube settings, have been presented at international theatre festivals and exhibition spaces, such as Tanzquartier Wien, Museum der Moderne Salzburg, steirischer herbst (Graz), Biennale of Sydney, Baltic Circle International Theatre Festival (Helsinki), Wiener Festwochen, mumok Wien and Griffith University Art Museum in Brisbane. Gehmacher is also a tutor and lecturer at several renowned education centres, such as P.A.R.T.S. (Brussels), HZT (Berlin), DOCH (Stockholm) and FU Berlin.