Doris Uhlich (A) Come Back

53% choreography 5% ballet 42% body memory

Five former ballet dancers return to the stage years after retiring from their active careers. While their contemporaries were changing society and the world at the end of the sixties, they were training at the barre. Did they follow this time of new beginnings happening around them? Were they aware of the changes taking place outside?
Now, as pensioners, they are establishing their own revolutionary movement with radical self-irony. Together with the young Viennese choreographer Doris Uhlich, who has already worked with former dancers in her piece “Spitze”, they have spent a year engaged in futurist archaeology. Without nostalgia and without personal justification, they search for the marks left inside their bodies by the ballet hierarchy and its rigorous body techniques. They do not look back, but forward: What mobilising power is here and now inside these disciplined bodies which have been changed by time?
“Come Back” is not a piece about ballet, although it is always present. Doris Uhlich’s performative modus operandi grapples with the bodies, discarded by ballet standards, and sets out into a landscape of motion that perceives its limits as a political opportunity.