SWAN LAKE

Psychologically speaking, infatuation is a necessary misjudgement; in terms of media philosophy, it is based on a simulacrum, a mirage.

The love craze that has been played out in the evergreen Swan Lake since 1877 draws on deceptive fictions as well as historical sources, such as the fairy tale The Stolen Veil by Karl August Musäus.

Romantic love as celebrated in Swan Lake is, according to Eva Illouz, neither fate nor coincidence, but a relatively new historical construction that is intensively cultivated in emotional capitalism. How could this longing to break out of identity prison be translated into stage designs that do not themselves want to fall into the lie of being disenchanted? 

Choreographer Chris Haring holds up broken mirrors to the bodies. His play with being and appearance, his handling of mirror images and mirages, explores the foreign in the own and the technical in the natural. It unfolds in the illusionary space of the Linz theatre machine and at the same time exposes its components. Instead of dancing swans and languishing princes, this post-romantic version of Swan Lake shows a flowing, a becoming of gestures and languages that points to the indeterminate of man between animal and machine.