MEDIATHEK

Chris Haring (born in 1970) lives in Vienna as a free-lance artist. Parallel to his studies of Music and Rhythm at the Vienna School of Music and Performing Arts, he studied Psychology at the Universtity of Vienna. He has gone to New York for further training at the Nikolai/Luis Dance Lab and at Cunningham School. After engagements as a dancer by DV8 Physical Theater, Nigel Charnock and Willi Dorner, he started a collaboration as a choreographer with the composer and multimedia artist Klaus Obermaier with whom he realized three pieces. D.A.V.E. (Digital Amplified Video Engine), Vivisector and recently Fremdkörper (Weird Bodies). The central thread of these three dance video productions is to “depict the body as a cybernetic landscape and to reflect upon the identity of the human body which as such can equally be a Cyborg-body: it can be modified genetically and technically, further on it may be manipulated so that binary concepts which until now have been defining the organism get into a new dynamic: genre/individuum, evolution/biography, healthy/sick, young/old, parents/children, man/woman. In 1995, Chris Haring founded the Grenztanz Festival (Boarder Dance Festival) in Burgenland, the Eastern Region of Austria next to Hungary. (Quelle: www.dancewebeurope.net) / jst