Hysteresis & Company

Drawings, performance footage of the queer dancer Tsuki and pluck sounds and drones by Oval are reorganised in a multicoloured organic tableau.

In the early days of cinema, audiences were hungry for pictures bursting with vitality. The serpentine dance with its graceful shifting patterns, and in colour, satisfied their wish.

Dance is primarily physical, and “Meat Joy” is the cinematic essence of an unrestrained celebration of a performance improvisation, with lots of skin and set to ambiguous popular songs.

In the cultural niches of the GDR, Christine Schlegel used painted and scratched-on 8mm stock to create her very own energetic cosmos of dance performance and projection.

Originally intended as a documentation of Tadeusz Kantor’s “informal painting”, the film develops a life of its own: The abstract form-finding itself becomes the movie star.

From the pictorial concept of the floral still life to a 3D archive for extinct plants: Floral sculptures add a new dimension to representation. But life? Stays still.

A naked body: Its skin envelope spreads and longs to be touched. The music asks what lust feels like and is answered by enchanting computer-generated images.

Soft clouds of light rotate, fan out and change colour: Pawłowski’s “Luxograms” exist only in the projection with a sophisticated system of lenses.

Flashes of dots, squiggles and lines scratched on the black leader create a space and an energy field to the rhythm of percussive African tribal music.