Doris Uhlich

I think they are two different ways of looking at people, society and themes — whether you engage with a group, with a group body and the question of individuality within collectivity, or whether you watch a solo or duet. In a group piece you’re much more in a bustling picture and switch between individuals. Different things are possible with a group than with one or two dancers. With few people you zoom much more into a biography or personality; in a group you have a larger corpus, more individuals, even more stories. It also depends on energy resources — after "Habitat / Halle E" with 120 performers, for example, I wanted to work in the smallest space at the Tanzquartier Wien with two performers I had known for a long time. I concentrate on a few bodies and after the more intimate process I’m re-energized for a large group. To me it’s clear: Life is not a solo, life is an ensemble work. That’s why I find it important to repeatedly initiate projects with many participants.

Doris Uhlich

I give a lot of workshops, also for people with little or no dance experience. I also approach people on the street. Often I find them through acquaintances — I’m very open and broadly positioned. Mostly it’s such that people cross my path, they come up to me. And depending on the theme I look for certain people, with certain biographies and backgrounds of physical inscriptions.

Doris Uhlich

It’s like an active suspended state of bodies that I translate. I use the equipment differently than it’s normally used — I appropriate and give the playground and its devices a different function, extend them with other functions or with no functions. I also approach it with a slowing down of movement. In the interplay of the dancers' isolation and encounters, of solitude and coming back together, a melancholic field emerges.

The soundtrack also gives the playground a certain atmosphere. Boris Kopeinig has assembled a very interesting soundtrack in which melancholy is audible not only as heaviness but also as a slowing down. For me melancholy is also incredibly alive, because thoughts circle internally and perhaps doubts about the world as well.

Doris Uhlich

The piece can be adapted to different playgrounds. The equipment is usually similar — swing, seesaw, slide. That’s interesting because it’s an extremely standardized place: it goes downhill, it goes uphill, and it goes along swinging and seesawing. I spent a lot of time on playgrounds with my niece and nephew. As an artist I suddenly had the intuition that the playground is a highly charged place, especially with projections into the future. Young people play there, and I often thought: hopefully you’ll do it better than we did.

Doris Uhlich

In the course of industrialization children in cities initially played in the streets. As car traffic increased it became more dangerous and fenced-off places were built — also because many children were run over. The equipment is often standardized, mainly for safety reasons. In addition, there are the more creative facilities, such as sand play areas, where it's less about athleticism and more about creativity and imagination. You can see different approaches — depending on whether the focus is stronger on the child’s own will or on classic devices.

In Vienna there are also a few barrier-free playgrounds. Barrier-free in this case usually means only that the access is barrier-free; there are no special pieces of equipment for children in wheelchairs. They try to join in with the usual equipment.

Doris Uhlich

I already had the idea beforehand. "melancholic ground" is the second part of my melancholy trilogy — before there was a piece titled "stuck", after that "SONNE". Melancholy had been a state that interested me for a long time. If you understand the melancholic person as an active person who perhaps reacts unconsciously to something, then they are also a political figure who goes against a current or counter-movement at a different speed and suddenly lands somewhere else — not in depression, passivity or blockage, but in an active suspended state of reflections, of thinking and circling questions that you ask yourself and the present.

Doris Uhlich

First it’s a gut feeling, something I perceive — in my surroundings or in myself. Melancholy is also a kind of taboo topic, something you experience very much alone. I asked myself how to make that collectively experienceable or bring states into the spotlight without formalizing them, but with a choreographic implementation of a feeling, of a need. Mostly I then begin to research the theory. It can also be that I first read a book and then my practical questioning of what that triggers in me begins. A performative implementation is something different than reading a book about something. Finding physical expression, implementation, translation for something you researched in theory is a completely different task and challenge.

Doris Uhlich

There are improvisation impulses from me, which are usually in a notebook. We try things out with these impulses. In "melancholic ground" I can observe as choreographer from the outside. A lively process arises with my notes, my ideas and an exchange with the performers. Then it’s about what feels right and where others can hook in. Ultimately they perform and not I. Movement material and situations arise in the moment, and I try to distill the essences — where I notice that the performer stands behind the material and that it translates outwardly for viewers. That’s my job.

Doris Uhlich

I have a very relaxed approach to nudity and often undress in rehearsals myself, especially at the beginning. I have developed techniques and methods so it starts and remains relaxed. That way you come less into moments where you visually examine yourself or others, but rather expand perception for oneself and for others and it becomes about more than an outer appearance. It’s about the energy of a body and how it moves, how each person is at home in their own body and can express themselves with their own body-house. It’s more about how a movement feels, not how it looks. In such processes there are often reversals — where, for example, a slimmer woman tells a corpulent one she wishes she had her butt because it swings so nicely. You go into the richness of movement possibilities that a naked body offers. That often feels very liberating from social codes and categories.

But "melancholic ground" is not about nudity, it’s about something else. The piece would make no sense nude at all.

Doris Uhlich

Performers of very different generations, some of whom I already knew very well from earlier works. It’s strongly about how standardized playground equipment is and which bodies are excluded. It’s about the question of upbringing. The great thing about performance is that while you watch, many questions walk around in your head: how formative childhood is, to what extent competition and comparing in the form of equipment are already laid out on the playground, or which social games take place there that are later played on in another form.

Doris Uhlich

Often there was a stage piece and then I think where else it could take place or where it thematically fits — e.g. "SUN site specific" in the ski jump stadium, a place that wishes for snowy winters, but which the climate crisis does not leave untouched. For the piece "TANK" the idea came to perform in the Anthropological Department of the Natural History Museum. Often a vision arises out of a stage piece and the desire to transform it into a site-specific performance. There are also places I would like "to body". That word, the verb "to körpern", unfortunately does not yet exist. But places like in "Habitat" with naked people are animated, contrasted or expanded differently by it; a temporary appropriation can take place. There are different approaches — either there is already a site-related interest, or organizers come to me and say: "We have a cool place, can you think of a performance for it?"

Doris Uhlich

My works speak to people who are interested in the theme or who generally have an interest in my work. There are announcements, then those who feel addressed come. In site-specific performances it’s interesting because you also surprise passers-by. Often the audience that comes especially for the performance mixes with people who happen to walk by. It’s nice that a mixing takes place and you come into contact with people who otherwise wouldn’t go to the theater or encounter my work. I find it great that that’s possible when you leave the stage space.

Doris Uhlich

When I started, for example, diversity was not as present; there was also less diversity to be seen on stage. I hope I have contributed with some works to things moving forward. The Internet has of course changed a lot — how you get information and how information spreads, also how artists do marketing; the speed has increased. Images spread faster; you often already know before a performance roughly how the images you will see will look. I think you are much more diffusely present today, which is also great because more people know about you in a short time. In principle works have become more cross-media, more interdisciplinary — also in the dance performance world.

Doris Uhlich

It’s not a time that cries out for a new departure. It’s a time in which you rather feel that certain things you wish for implode. That affects everyone: through austerity packages, budget holes; we are in a time of war, conflict and a shift to the right. That inscribes itself into bodies. In that sense I would say, dancing against that is still possible if you have the strength — that’s my personal wish and approach. I believe it’s not currently a time when all doors are open to you. Art and culture are often not a top priority. When arts sectors are cut and people stop being artists because they can no longer afford it, this has repercussions for subsequent generations. All that we have worked for as achievements — for example feminist ones — must be upheld and preserved.

Doris Uhlich

Next week "Come Back Again" goes to Glasgow. Then I’m at the Münchner Kammerspiele for an acting production. And thinking far ahead: it would be great to found a dance company, a dance ensemble in Vienna. Maybe even a Doris Uhlich dance school. And otherwise that art continues — as it says on Vienna’s Sezession — "free" and not prescribed regulations. That contemporary spirits remain present and there is a parallelism of tradition and contemporary art, without evaluative mechanisms that erase.

Doris Uhlich

I find the moment very interesting when the space begins to lodge itself in the bodies and that also becomes visible through costume — that you yourself become the play device that can be played with. Then you can ask: How do we adults actually continue to play? Which role plays exist? Which power games? Which social games? I think the playground is the kick-off for the game of life — or for how we continue to play with each other. The costume element was an interesting step for me to also visualize that — in costumes and a stage picture on the body. You yourself become the swing you can sit on, the seesaw others can rock.

"melancholic ground" also shows how you begin to compare and measure each other, and what methods of measurement there are — like that classic lineup in physical education class: "Line up in order of height." As a child I never really understood why I need to know who is taller or shorter. I think "melancholic ground" raises questions about where and when we begin to be sorted, or are taught to fit into certain categories of measurability.

„melancholic ground“ zeigt auch, wie man sich gegenseitig beginnt zu vergleichen, zu messen, und welche Methoden zu messen es gibt — wie diese klassische Aufstellreihe im Turnunterricht: „Stellt euch der Größe nach auf.“ Ich habe als Kind nie genau verstanden, warum ich wissen muss, wer größer oder kleiner ist. Ich finde, „melancholic ground“ wirft Fragen auf, wo wir und wann wir beginnen, eingeordnet zu werden, oder es uns anerzogen wird, uns in bestimmte Kategorien der Messbarkeit einzufügen.

Doris Uhlich

Yes, and that’s exactly the cool thing about "melancholic ground": it goes beyond the equipment. We constantly deal with devices or ideas that come onto the market or are proposed as the best product, and we often take them on without asking, appropriate them. "melancholic ground" takes the freedom — or also the pleasure and desire — to appropriate things and not just accept them as presented. In that sense it’s about the possibility each of us has to turn things around or view them from different perspectives.

In "melancholic ground" it’s like with Susanne Kirnbauer in "Come Back Again": in that piece it’s actually about dealing with very specific physical inscriptions — a bodily archive, a history, a disciplining from back then. But in the end the audience can connect with her even if they were never a ballerina. Because it’s about performance — we all have to perform — and it’s about a certain way of dealing with hierarchies or expectations of oneself, further about aging and the courage to take a new path when you realize it’s no longer going forward. It’s about preserving courage and curiosity even as you get older.

I think it’s about much more than a ballet treatise in and with an old body. And it’s similar with "melancholic ground": although it takes place on a playground and you watch the performers, it goes beyond — by allowing the audience to come into contact with themselves, with a theme that concerns their own body, and not only the body of others.