Hold and Resist Spin-Off Version

ImpulsTanz [ENA] Three months after its donaufestival premiere in the Kremser Dominikanerkirche, HOLD&RESIST has slipped out of its cathedral acoustics and taken up residence in the White Cube on Level -2 of mumok, where Chris Haring and Liquid Loft opened the Spin-Off Version on 4 August, with a second showing on 6 August. It is the company's eleventh appearance at ImPulsTanz in mumok since 2015.

Gone is the Radian score that gave the Krems piece its wide, delicately swinging drone. In its place, Andreas Berger — co-founder of Liquid Loft alongside Haring, Stephanie Cumming and Thomas Jelinek — builds the soundworld live, from nothing but the amplified body: breath, tremor, the friction of skin on painted floor, the tiny report of a heel taking weight again. Coralie Bénard, Jackson Carroll, François-Eloi Lavignac, Katharina Meves and Hannah Timbrell inhabit Thomas Jelinek's stripped scenography as five human seismographs.

The choreography is scarcely "dance" in any orthodox sense: it is a sequence of sculptural, sometimes torturously long holds punctured by micro-resistances — a shoulder rising against gravity's dictate, a spine refusing to fold on schedule. Haring, who has spent two decades reading the body as cybernetic landscape and cyborg-theory subject, has arrived at something unexpectedly political. When does social pressure become bodily refusal, when does spirit reshape willingness into resistance and haul the exhausted body with it? In the mumok basement, with the audience close enough to hear each involuntary intake of breath, the question loses all abstraction.