GAP

Having a place to live is a basic human need, but finding affordable housing is becoming increasingly difficult for many people. In her new play “GAP”, Doris Uhlich works with formerly homeless people. The stage becomes a place where the performers claim space with their bodies and language. Their biographies and bodies are archives of personal stories and traces of their lives – more than just subjective narratives. They render the story of the present visible. The performance addresses their precarity in public life as well as their disappearance from it. With transparent, inflatable objects that suggest elementary forms of construction, she and the performers create temporary spaces and landscapes as sanctuaries on stage.

In the context of the performances of “GAP”, Residenz will host a workshop over several days, where choreographer Doris Uhlich, DJ Boris Kopeinig and homeless or formerly homeless people from Leipzig will get together. Issues like precarity and disappearing, periphery and centre will be touched upon and illuminated through body and language. The workshop will end with a public presentation for the interested audience.

Doris Uhlich is an Austrian choreographer and performer who develops projects in a variety of formats – from stage pieces to site-specific performances. She works with people of varied biographies and physical attributions, opens the dance floor for people with physical disabilities, shows the potential of nudity beyond erotization and provocation, or finds many ways to explore the relationship between humans and machines. She has received numerous prizes and awards. Most recently, she received the 2024 Austrian Art Prize of the Austrian Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, Public Service and Sport in the category of Performing Arts. Her piece “SONNE” was awarded the 2024 Austrian Music Theatre Prize as Best Dance Production. At Residenz, she created the coproductions “Every Body Electric” (2018) and “Gootopia – The Treatment” (2022). Furthermore, Doris Uhlich and Michael Turinsky presented their production “Ravemachine” in 2017 and the piece “TANK” in 2022 as a guest performance within the context of the Institute for Future.