About the Tanz Atelier Wien

The starting point for the artistic survey is space itself. Extraordinary concepts and choreographies evolve in it, which merge dance, music, arts and film into new content. Sebastian Prantl and Cecilia Li develop multilayered projects, ensemble pieces, concerts, symposia, labs and jams, which they network globally.

Since 1988 over fifty project series have been realised, investigating topics such as Friedrich Kiesler’s “Space Stage”, William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet“, Piet Mondrian’s last painting “Boogie Woogie”, Sigmund Freud’s “The Interpretation of Dreams”, working with titles like Eikon, Carthasis, Iconostasis, Kairos, Memento and Divertimento… The music concepts comprise classical, modern, as well as contemporary music, ranging from Scarlatti, Mozart to John Cage and Bach, Schubert to Cerha and David Lang…

TAW functions also as a think tank for projects and interventions fostering new choreographic positions, which are being contextualized and transferred to venues such as churches, swimming pools, railway stations, village squares, black boxes, opera houses, museums, parks and concert halls…

The continuous work on the appropriate choreographic material is evolving through thematic and spatial pivot points which are investigated by the protagonists in regard to content, practice, negotiating and resulting in abstracted, concretised pieces. This is all based on a choreographic discourse as art based research (= pure research). A prerequisite for this is a dialectical approach in which the multicultural ensemble introduces its own movement vocabulary, thus sharing an overall contemporary dance gesture, which is then distilled and interwoven by the choreographer. The challenge is to initiate the process, accelerate it, abstract and network it:

…When you see, hear and experience what is taking place within this atmospheric space, what Sebastian Prantl, Cecilia Li and their dance ensemble create out of space, music and movement, it becomes clear that it is not a question of the presentation of a virtuoso gesture independent of people. For what is evident and most important, emerging on the changing “stages“ is a relation. Not only a relation to music, space and the audience but also and above all that between the dancers themselves…