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MAYBE FOREVER

THE TOMBSTONE OF OUR DESIRE MAYBE FOREVER, Meg Stuart's and Philipp Gehmacher's first joint-venture, is a contemporary interpretation of motionless dance that comes alive thanks to the alchemy between two kindred minds. Its themes of alienation and melancholy are ultimately woven into a harmony that touches the heart with its sheer power and vulnerability. Such is the impact that it reaffirms one's faith in the authentic presence within a theatrical framework. In MAYBE FOREVER, Meg Stuart and Philipp Gehmacher represent, as choreographer and dancer, the sensitivities of two generations. Meg Stuart's 1991 debut - Disfigure Study - was a registration, an illustration, a rendering of and a comment on alienation, speed and fragmentation in an age on the run. One year later, she made a solo piece about a man reaching for his memories, in which the absence of motion articulated a new vocabulary of'movement'. But standing still expressed an explicit political message rather than a new perspective in her choreographic work: the man on stage was the French critic and organizer Jean-Marc Adolphe who had organized a project in Paris around immobility as a reaction against the wars in the Gulf and Bosnia. If standing still for Meg Stuart is a political, rational or conceptual statement imposed on or added to the body, Philipp Gehmacher's is a different kind of motionlessness. Over and over again, he comes to a halt in order to fully grasp the reality of the body in the here and now of its environment. The resulting vulnerability is devoid of social and theatrical conventions. Again and again, he makes the connection with his body and his immediate surroundings in order to create the possibility for transformation and renewal. Taking this as the nexus of the performance, MAYBE FOREVER can be read as an expression of the urgent need for purely individual survival strategies - and also of personal responsibility-within what Peter Sloterdijk describes as the hyperkinetic project of modernity, whereby continuous and ever faster movement is both the motor and cost of admission. Whoever is caught up in this mechanism has no time for what is in front of them. Such an insurmountable present must be compensated for: wistfulness and melancholia about the past are never far away. And as chance would have it, these two states of mind form the framework of MAYBE FOREVER. (...) The power of the performance lies in its counterpoint. It maximizes the impact of how onto the history of broken and fragmented movements and bodies, of standing still in dance, something new is added here. The new open and generative'now'is highlighted by everything that is'not-now': recollection and desire - the evergreens, memories, the image of the wishing flower, words from the past on the soundscape, the tombstone / altar. At the same time it becomes clear that no past exists that is not at work anymore: the most remote and minute past seems to give shape to the new connections that turn the body's 'now' into a continuously renewed present that resonates in a continuously renewed space. Gehmacher enters, opens up to what is present now, integrates, repositions and continues, to time and again repeat the whole procedure. In this way every standstill is a memory as well, every given that has passed is taken along.

Vampires struggle with eternity and loneliness Human seings snuggle with each other and with the fact that things are nos forever Everyone struggles with something In the end, and fortunately there are songs that make us feel better about it all. Taken from the programme book MAYoSfQrS Г

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